Taiwan on the Knife's Edge 

By NEIL STEINBERG, the Chicago Sun-Times

July 15, 2002 
 
KINMEN, Taiwan - Tourists now tramp through the once-secret submarine pens, carved out of the living rock of this tiny island, 2,000 yards off the coast of communist China. Holding colorful maps, they shuffle through old command posts, gazing through powerful mounted binoculars at the People's Republic of China, one mile and a vast, unbreachable ideological chasm away. 

This speck in the Straits of Taiwan does not seem like one of the world's great geopolitical flash points. Dogs laze in the street in the noonday sun. There are military defenses--blockhouses and pillboxes and such. But they have a flimsy, cardboard look to them, like structures in an amusement park. A few fields are spotted with square posts bearing three long spikes--a government guide describes these as "anti-parachute defenses." The few soldiers glimpsed on the side of the road are relaxed, sprawled under trees, resting. 

But Kinmen, like the DMZ between the Koreas, is a place where competing powers exist in uneasy tangency--in this case, the vast, 1.3 billion-person empire of the Chinese Communists, and a minute outpost for Taiwan's 23 million-citizen democracy--and has been for nearly half a century. If the average American is aware of one spot in Taiwan, it is here. Kinmen--then known as Quemoy--was one of the hot-button issues of the 1960 presidential election. The Communists had lobbed a half million shells into the island in 1958, trying to drive the Nationalists away. President Dwight Eisenhower--who had sent the 7th Fleet to the area when aggression seemed likely--vowed to defend Quemoy, and its neighbor, Matsu. 
Presidential challenger Sen. John F. Kennedy didn't think it was worth risking global war over what he considered militarily worthless and indefensible specks "lying virtually in a harbor on the Chinese mainland." 

Kennedy's opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, who would spend five years driving America deeper into Vietnam, was ready to go to the mat over Quemoy. 
"I think it is shocking for a candidate for the president to say that he is willing to hand over a part of the free world to the communist world," he said on the campaign trail. "If you elect me president, I assure you that I will not hand over one square foot of the free world to the Communists." 

Kennedy won, but the issue did not go away. The Communists kept shelling Kinmen--in 1965, in 1975, and other years. In return, the Taiwanese like to portray Kinmen as an armed camp, bristling with military might. 

"The island is hollow," whispers one government official, as if imparting a great secret. Tourists landing at Kinmen are told not to take pictures of the beach--though it is hard to imagine their seeing anything that couldn't be glimpsed by sophisticated cameras across the narrow band of water, not to mention Chinese spy satellites orbiting overhead. 

China likes to lob missiles into the Straits of Taiwan, and Taiwan makes a show of keeping its fighter jets fueled and ready on the tarmac. But how real is the risk of China deciding to seize Taiwan militarily? The popular opinion is that China will posture and threaten but never actually invade so long as Taiwan does not officially declare independence. 

"They may be thugs and crazy at times, but they're not that crazy," said Richard Vuylsteke, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan. "There's too much going in China's favor right now as far as economic integration is concerned." 

That is the economy-minded American view. The Red Chinese, however, are emphatic that--economic boom or no--they will not allow Taiwan to slip out of their grasp. 

"Some people are confused regarding the status of Taiwan," said Jin Zhijian, the consul general of the People's Republic of China in Chicago. "This issue has been solved quite clearly: Taiwan is part of China. This has won the support of the international community." 

In other words, while China, for the moment, will wait for its "renegade province" to rejoin the mother it left in 1949, the PRC is "totally opposed" to letting Taiwan go off on its own, and will fight to keep it. 

"We do not want to fight a war with our compatriots," said Zhijian. "But the reason why we couldn't give up the use of force is that we cannot exclude the possibility of someone declaring independence in part of the island." 
That would bring a Chinese military response. 

"Chinese people cherish their territory more than their lives," he said. "They don't want to lose an inch of territory. We hope the U.S. can support a peaceful reunification." 
And indeed the United States does, officially endorsing China's "one China" philosophy. But underline the word "peaceful." While the United States has joined the world in eagerly forging closer ties with China--even Taiwan has been rushing to invest on the mainland--it has also made it clear that it will not stand idly by should China decide to subjugate Taiwan. 

"The American policy is to not allow Taiwan to be conquered by force," said a top U.S. general directing military defense of the Pacific region, speaking not for attribution. He said our military is concerned that, despite protestations of patience, China is secretly preparing to conquer Taiwan sometime soon. 

"They appear to be rehearsing at least some of that," he said, adding that one factor on the side of peace is the inherent difficulty of invading an island. 

"It would be a difficult challenge if unopposed," the general said. 

Difficult, but not impossible. The Taiwanese military is underarmed, and its battle plan and integration between services are poor. There is little concept of home defense and much reliance on American military might, which would be able to prevail in a battle now, but not necessarily in the future. 

"If something were to happen today, we have enough forces to handle the problem," the general said. "Five years from now might be a different story." 

For years, Taiwan resisted investing in China, not wanting to strengthen a future foe. But now the two countries are delicately embracing each other--the first Chinese tourists are actually visiting Taiwan. The hope is that commerce and time helps the two nations find a peaceful road to the future they can journey down together. 

Perhaps one of the more optimistic symbols can be seen in the case of Chen-Dong Wu, a blacksmith on Kinmen, who makes his living pounding steel from old communist shell casings--which can be collected by the thousands in the Kinmen countryside--into lightweight and very sharp knives. 

The manufacturing end of the operation is very low-tech--Wu with a hammer, sending orange sparks off his anvil. But his company's packaging is graphically modern and attractive, and would not look out of place at Williams-Sonoma. And yes, the knives are sold back to communist China, the nation that sent the raw material over in the first place. So that is progress, of a sort.