On Oct. 17, 1949 a mother on the island of Jinmen sent her son over to the mainland, 3km away, to buy some cooking oil. That afternoon the ferries stopped running, and he wasn’t able to return for 40 years.
The story is told in a new book on the island, known to Westerners at the time by its dialect name of Quemoy, by Harvard’s Michael Szonyi. In it he mixes a description of Jinmen’s role as a crucial pawn in the Cold War with a dispassionate look at what the experience was like for the islanders themselves, based on 70 new interviews, together with other recollections already in print.
When Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) was forced to retreat to Taiwan in late 1949, he found himself still in possession of quite a number of islands strung out along the Chinese coast. There was the Dachen group opposite Zhejiang province, the Mazu group, Jinmen itself and its neighboring islets, and the whole of Hainan to the south. Hainan fell to the Communists in 1950 and the Dachen group was evacuated after a military defeat in 1955.
Jinmen and Mazu, within sight of the mainland and a full 100km from Taipei, thus became nerve centers in a stand-off between opposing ideologies. Eisenhower called the attacks on then a “Gilbert and Sullivan war,” meaning it was a comic parody that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But thousands died in the 1949 landing and the artillery barrages of 1954 to 1945 and 1958, and at one point the US announced it was willing to risk a nuclear strike to defend the freedom of the inhabitants of these vulnerable outposts. These tiny islands, too dry to grow rice and having to depend instead on sweet potatoes and peanuts, could have been the trigger for a Third World War.
Following the landing of 8,000 People’s Liberation Army troops on Oct. 25, 1949 and their defeat by Chiang’s forces, leaving almost 4,000 invaders dead and over 1,000 Republic of China forces killed, a thorough militarization quickly ensued. The local fishing fleet, clearly important on an otherwise poor island, was destroyed — ostensibly, Szonyi says, for raw materials, but probably also to prevent military personnel from defecting back to the mainland. Houses were torn down, doors requisitioned as roofs for underground shelters, and the population subjected to forced labor and intense political surveillance. Whereas martial law was lifted in Taiwan itself in 1987, on Jinmen it remained in force until 1992.
All this puts Jinmen on a par with Vietnam’s Hue, the fields of Flanders, Korea’s Panmunjom, and all other places in the world where military powers have at one time or another found themselves playing out their conflict games, and ordinary life as a result has become impossible.
Of course, in states of emergency of all kinds many ordinary things become non-viable. The quiet life that on Jinmen had led to performances of operas and the functioning of tea-houses was replaced by villages that were, in Szonyi’s words, “no longer civilian population centers to be protected and defended by the army, but military installations in their own right.” And this is what militarization is — the seeing and using of everything from buildings to crops, ships to people, as means of furthering the military’s aims, rather than as existing as the slow processes of history had led them to become.
By the mid-1970s there were probably well over 80,000 military on Mazu and Jinmen, out of a total of Taiwanese bearing arms of almost half a million. The civilian population was around 60,000, and 40 percent of households were operating small businesses to cater to the gigantic garrison, a figure which, the author comments, “must be among the highest rates of entrepreneurship of any society in history.”
There’s an interesting section on the military’s brothels on Jinmen, known as “831” (apparently either a sexual pun or a phone-number). The author states, inexplicably, that he’s decided not to try to interview former prostitutes from this system, but points out it was quite open, and carefully regulated by the authorities. A couplet outside one brothel read: “The hero risks his life on the frontier; the heroine contributes her body to serve the nation”.
Taiwan itself had licensed prostitution at the time, he writes, and locals on Jinmen believed that most of the 250 or so girls who worked there at the system’s peak had broken some of the rules that applied in Taiwan itself, and though Szonyi himself doubts this he insists Jinmen females were never so used. He dutifully engages in calculations as to how many soldiers were entertained by each girl in a day. The estimates he collects vary from at least 10 to five times that number, with fireworks let off in celebration when some sex-worker broke the record.
Though the essence of this book is far from jocular, there are other anomalies that can’t help raise a smile. The author relates, for instance, how the idea of tunnels from which to launch a counter-attack after a possible invasion came from the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese tunnels, however, were the work of the Communists, but to admit that was impossible in 1960s Taiwan, so it was claimed instead that they were an aspect of a form of fortified community developed in Vietnam by the US.
The reason Cold War Island is such a persuasive account is that the author is everywhere cautious but thorough. When he claims something, you believe him, and this is in essence not because of his academic credentials but because of his style. Michael Szonyi is neither a sensationalist nor a slave to modish nostrums in the history academy, and his well-researched book is as a result a very welcome addition to Taiwan’s story.
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