China and Taiwan play a dangerous game of cat and mouse around the Kinmen archipelago

From Kinmen, if the day is clear, you can clearly see the imposing skyscrapers of the Chinese city of Xiamen, which is just three kilometers away.. Many of the 127,000 residents of this small archipelago in the South China Sea long for their neighbor's progress and fear their misfortune at finding themselves on the front lines of a possible future war.. Kinmen is under the control of Taiwan. And since the self-governed island is 187 kilometers away, there is always a permanent detachment of 3,000 Taiwanese soldiers on the archipelago.

It was a fairly calm start to the year for clashes between Beijing and Taipei.. Even in January there were Taiwanese elections with the victory of the candidate who did not want Xi Jinping's regime. For China, Lai ching-te, the new Taiwanese leader, is an “independence troublemaker”. But unlike other times, there was no Chinese tantrum in the form of military maneuvers around Taiwan.

There was a strange calm until the Asian superpower and the island with a young democracy have resumed the old game of cat and mouse, this time with Kinmen as the epicenter of tensions.

Last week, off the coast of the archipelago, two Chinese fishermen drowned while being chased by the Taiwanese coast guard.. Chinese speedboat carrying four people capsizes while fleeing. “The evil incident seriously damaged the feelings of compatriots on both sides of the Strait,” said Zhu Fenglian, spokesman for Beijing's Taiwan affairs office.

From Taipei they regretted the “unfortunate incident” and assured that the boat had “illegally entered Taiwanese waters”. Those days, during the Chinese New Year holidays, the Taiwanese authorities had already reported that many Chinese fishing boats were entering their waters to catch fish.

On Sunday, the Chinese coast guard increased regular patrols around Kinmen. A day later, one of these patrols boarded a Taiwanese tourist boat. Six agents inspected the ship and asked the crew for documentation. The ship had diverted into Chinese waters to avoid a sandbar. A common maneuver that normally does not provoke any reaction from the neighbor.

On Tuesday, it was the turn of Taiwanese patrols, who chased away with several boats a Chinese coast guard ship that had entered waters near Kinmen, where Taiwanese soldiers stationed there shot down a surveillance drone for the first time last year. Chinese.

“Fishermen from both sides have traditionally operated in the waters of Xiamen-Kinmen. There is no territory under Taiwan's control in the legal sense.. The mainland's regular police patrols in the related waters are legitimate,” read a statement from the Chinese authorities.. Taiwan, although it functions de facto as an independent country, has barely a dozen countries that recognize its sovereignty.

Taiwan control

Kinmen has been controlled by Taiwan since the Kuomintang nationalists, who lost the civil war against Mao Zedong's army in 1949, took refuge on the main island and took over outposts on other outlying islands.. A decade later, during the Cold War, routine bombing raids against Kinmen were launched from the mainland.. There were around 470,000 projectiles in 44 days, leaving more than 600 dead.

Old bunkers still stand in the archipelago. They are a tourist attraction, but some residents think they can still be useful in case Beijing makes good on its threat to invade Taiwan, which it considers a separatist province.. But the strong Taiwanese identity they feel in Taipei does not have as much roots in Kinmen, where they have seen the enormous development of Xiamen very closely in recent years.

Precisely, it is this attraction of economic progress that Beijing is using to attract residents of the peripheral islands to the province of Fujian, where Xiamen and other large cities are located that offer Taiwanese facilities to obtain residence permits, good job opportunities and even housing subsidies.