Accidental Border: Kinma Islands and the Making of Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Borders not only delimit state territory but also differentiate state spaces, delineating the periphery from the core. However, a remote borderland is not necessarily the periphery, rather, it can function as a core component in the making of the state. By examining the border islands of Kinmen and Matsu (or Kinma, as abbreviated here) in the Taiwan Strait, we illuminate how the state relocated itself through border measures, and how accidental border activities, in turn, reshaped the state. We contend that since the Chinese civil war abruptly delineated new borders around Kinma Islands in 1949, the dramatic changes in the daily life of the islanders not only passively reflected the geopolitical dynamics during the Cold War, but also actively engendered the (re)building of state and nation in Taiwan and (re)positioning Taiwan in the world. Studying differently scaled and territorialised daily practices as they intersect at the accidental borders, we suggest, provides a contra perspective to rediscover the making of nation/states and the framing of the Cold War.

Acknowledgments

We sincerely appreciate Professor Takashi Yamazaki who organized the EARCAG-GPE meeting in Osaka in 2019, and led to the publication of this special issue. Also, our gratitude goes to the three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on the earlier version. As usual, we are responsible for all errors and/or mistakes.

Notes

1. Matthew Sparke proposed a critical reflection on the hyphen in nation-state, which has traditionally symbolised the reciprocal consolidation of national homelands and state territories, thus giving state regulation its space and place of legitimacy. He sought to explore how the anaemic geographies of Canada and the United States as hyphenated nation-states can and must be rediscovered as sites of geographical displacement and disjuncture. We use ‘nation/state’ instead of ‘nation-state’, not to deny the mutually reinforcing geographical processes, rather, standing on the same line with Sparke, to ‘investigate their limits while also demonstrating their value as ways of making sense of some of the heterogeneous realignments of state hegemony and diverse rearticulations of nation in the contemporary world (Sparke 2005 p. XV) ‘.

2. We use the concepts of the core and the periphery, like Immanuel Wallerstein did, emphasising the relationality and positionality of territories. Rather than discussing the relationship between the central government and locals, we are more concerned with the relations between the dominant core and the remote borderlands. Compared with the theory of the world system, the difference we emphasise is the limits of the core. Not only the periphery is systematically shaped, but the core, in turn, may also be changed by the periphery through accidental borders.

3. In his article ‘Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography,’ Matthew Sparke (2007) discussed the geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses imagined as part of a foreign policy of accumulation by dispossession. Here we echo his call to critically examine the geographical grounds of hope and fear.

4. ‘Indigenisation of the ROC’ in this paper refers to different or even conflicting political, social, or cultural agendas that are common in recognising and confirming the actually existing ROC (whose territory is limited to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, abbreviated as TPKM), not the whole China, as the priority object of attention. These can be regarded as different decolonising project in response to the major geopolitical changes in East Asia, that is, the ROC was replaced by the PRC in the United Nations, and the US changed its diplomatic recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing. The indigenisation of the ROC does not necessarily mean moving towards the independence of Taiwan. Some people emphasise re-conceptualising the Chinese nation that was divided by the Cold War (e.g., Ning 2016), thus to indigenise Chineseness; some others are committed to the ‘Community Empowerment Project’ that makes communities the new players between the state and society, thus to indigenise the legitimacy of the state (Huang and Hsu 2011).

5. Parts of the case study was posted on FcaalBlog under the title ‘Cold War islands and the rebordering of the nation/state: Kinma in the Taiwan Strait.’ (http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/18/cold-war-islands-and-the-rebordering-of-the-nationstate-kinma-in-the-taiwan-strait/).

6. The formal name of the treaty is The Mutual Defence Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of China. It entered into force Mar. 3, 1955.

7. The PRC announced a large decrease in bombardment levels on October 6, 1958. Afterwards, both sides continued to bombard each other on alternate days. However, the subsequent bombardments were mainly based on an informal arrangement with shells containing not explosives but propaganda leaflets and, hence, creating fewer casualties (Kinmen County Government 1992). The last shelling in the record was on December 15, 1978, the day before the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the PRC and the US was announced.

8. Martial law was enforced in Taiwan from May 20^th1949 to July 15^th1987. This is generally called the ‘white terror era’ in Taiwan (Chen 2009c).

9. Here we see ‘authenticity’ through the perspective of performativity. The authentic entity does not exist outside its ‘doing’ but its performance is also a reiteration of previous ‘doings’ that become naturalised as social norms. Performing the sedimented forms of social practices become so routinised as to appear authentic (Nash 2000).

10. The ‘Three Principles of the People’ (三民主義) is a political philosophy developed by Sun Yat-sen, which can be translated into nationalism (民族主義), democracy (民權主義), and the livelihood of the people (民生主義). These three principles were claimed as the basis for the ideologies of the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek to refute communism, even though the Communists also think of themselves as Sun’s true followers and practitioners of his socialist thoughts.

11. Such ‘graduation tours’ were organised for students in Kinmen as well (Kinmen County Government 1992).

12. Wei-Pin Lin (2009) attributed the peripheral subjectivity of the Matsu people not only to the experience of losing the importance as a frontline after demilitarisation, but also to the fear that Matsu might be bypassed and forgotten both by Taiwan and China since the direct cross-strait links have been established. She argued that the creation of the cross-border pilgrimage was an act of empowerment that reflected the desire of the Matsu people to regain their lost position.

13. ‘The Administrative Measures for Small-Scale Trade with Taiwan’ was issued on September 24, 1993, by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation and the General Administration of Customs of the People’s Republic of China. It was implemented in designated ports in coastal provinces such as Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Shandong. According to the law, cross-strait trade is legal in the sense that it is regarded as a special local-to-local internal trade.

14. See note 1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan [MOST 108-2410-H-002-181-MY3].