New chapter for Taiwan’s frontier island

Editor’s Note: This piece by  Nga Pham features quotes from CSP Senior Fellow, Grant Newsham.

“Ai ni” (“Love you”) – reads a telegram dated Dec. 13, 1978. It was probably sent by a military wife or girlfriend to her man stationed in Matsu during the time of heightened cross-strait tension.

It’s on display as part of an art exhibition held at the Matsu Biennial Arts Festival.

“Missing Wormhole of Matsu returns to the war zone administration era between 1956 and 1992 on Matsu,” the curators said, describing “the gravity of longing in the stacks of telegraphs, the piles of spent phone cards in the hundreds, and each turn, loop, and stroke on handwritten letters…”

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the outlying islands of Matsu and Kinmen, occupied by the Chinese Nationalists, came under artillery barrage from the Chinese mainland, especially during the so-called Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958. Intermittent shelling continued until 1979.

At its wartime peak, Matsu hosted around 50,000 troops, dwarfing the number of civilians. The tiny islands, just a stone’s throw away from mainland China, served as a buffer zone between communism and Nationalist Taiwan.

“Taiwan’s ‘frontier’ islands were useful from a military perspective — providing both intelligence-collection platforms and also positions from which to threaten a Chinese assault force heading towards Taiwan,” said Grant Newsham, a retired U.S. Marine colonel who spent a year studying Taiwan’s defenses. “Chinese military planners cannot ignore this threat.”

“And don’t forget the political significance of Taiwan-owned-and-occupied islands anywhere – and especially near the Chinese mainland – that demonstrate Taiwan’s viability and existence as an independent nation,” he added.

Throughout his presidency (1950-1975) the Nationalist party Kuomintang’s leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had to retreat to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated in the Chinese Civil War, continued making preparations to take back mainland China.

Even now, anti-Communist slogans such as “Recover the Mainland” and “Liberate Our Mainland Compatriots” can still be seen on some of the buildings in Matsu.

A New York Times journalist who visited the islands in 1976 noticed the sense of “visiting a living tension point” when he was guided past soldiers carrying rifles and full field packs, tanks and cannons.

“… soldiers on constant alert man radios and telephones, plot coordinates on highly detailed maps – and spring to attention when senior officers walk in them,” wrote journalist Donald Kirk.