Vague silhouettes of skyscrapers on the twilight horizon: China. In the evening heat haze, it seems so close, the People’s Republic. Only eight short kilometers separate it from this other world, this behind the scenes from which we observe it, at the end of a September day: from Kinmen beach, a small island belonging to Taiwan but located at a big hour’s flight of the capital Taipei, the buildings of the Chinese city of Xiamen (province of Fujian), give the traveler a little the impression of having arrived on the “front line” of a deaf and long “battle”, this animosity bloodless characteristic of the adversarial relationship between China and Taiwan.
On one side of the strait, a Beijing dictatorship where the individual is invited to submit to the order of the supporters of a “mandate from heaven” with a post-communist sauce; on the other, a young parliamentary democracy which affirms, ever stronger and ever faster, a Taiwanese identity, distinct from that of the “mainland”.
For seventy-three years, Beijing has been threatening to forcibly “reunite” the “rebel island” with Eternal China. The year 2022 may have marked a turning point: war in Ukraine, the emergence of a holy Sino-Russian “alliance” and the visit to Taipei on August 2 by the Speaker of the American House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi – who provoked, in retaliation, very aggressive Chinese military exercises during which missiles flew over the island – all these events contributed to a little more tense the atmosphere on both sides of the 180 kilometers of strait separating the two protagonists.
Under the neo-Maoist tyrant Xi Jinping, the “empire” is sending growing signs of hostility towards the island and its 23 million inhabitants.
A kind of speculative worry
An absolute calm reigns on the “front” of Kinmen, located, for its misfortune, on the Chinese side of the strait. Only metal stakes pointing west and driven into the sand recall more turbulent times, the battle of October 1949, when soldiers of the communist People’s Liberation Army tried, in vain, to seize this large flat island (150 square kilometers). A few weeks before the “generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek, the former president of nationalist China during the Second World War, and his troops defeated by those of Mao Zedong, set foot on the island of Taiwan proper, much more to the East. Chiang’s soldiers repelled the invader here, failing to contain the Communist thrust into mainland China. As illustrated, in a very Sulpician style, by the “kitch realist” paintings in the Kinmen museum, depicting communist soldiers kneeling on the beach, scared to death and begging their enemies to spare them…
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