![]() ![]() test-fired eleven Dongfeng ballistic missiles, which landed in waters around Taiwan at least four flew over the island itself. As she greeted officials, an American aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Then, on August 2nd, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, arrived in Taiwan, making her the highest-ranking American official to visit in twenty-five years. ![]() Two weeks later, the People’s Liberation Army announced that it would hold a live-fire exercise seventy miles off the island’s coast. “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China,” he said. Under international law, the strait has long been considered an open waterway Wang was sweeping that away. On June 13th, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, declared that the People’s Republic had “sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” over the Taiwan Strait. This past summer, the fight for Taiwan flared again. “What would the people of Taiwan do? Jump into the ocean and swim?” “Maybe the war is coming back,” he told me. On the beach near Lin’s house, visitors can still see the bunkers and barriers, where people he knew in his youth fought the Chinese. During my visit, he showed me rusting artillery shells that he has piled in his hallway-mementos of the long conflict between the fragile island democracy of Taiwan and the behemoth next door, which has never stopped trying to assert dominion. He spent a year in the hospital and still walks with a limp. One day in 1975, when Lin was serving in a Taiwanese artillery unit, a shell exploded nearby, tearing off a chunk of his right thigh. When I visited not long ago, an eighty-year-old resident named Lin Ma-teng recalled hearing the shells as a young boy: “I used to hide under my bed.” Frustrated, the Chinese began bombarding Kinmen, flinging thousands of artillery shells across the water in the hope of forcing its people to surrender. The invading forces, expecting an easy victory, were met with surprising resistance, from fighters dug in behind rows of steel spikes and in cement bunkers along the beach. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Kinmen was the scene of ferocious assaults by Communist China as it tried to seize control. Whereas Xiamen is a place of gleaming high-rises, Kinmen is dotted with low-slung villages and patches of forest it is famous for kaoliang, a sweet but fearsomely potent liquor distilled from sorghum. The island, about twelve miles from end to end, sits across the bay from the bustling mainland city of Xiamen. On Kinmen, an outlying island of Taiwan, the Chinese mainland looms so close that you can hear the construction cranes booming across the water. ![]()
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