Where Taiwan and China meet

摘要

New links with the mainland will help economic integration, even though the political gulf remains enormous. There is a nostalgic charm about one of the world's last cold-war boundaries, that between Communist China and the handful of tiny islands just off the coast which have been controlled by Taiwan since Nationalist troops fled the mainland in 1949. The two sides used to shell each other desultorily—and, thoughtfully, on alternate days. Today there are fewer Taiwanese soldiers on the island of Jinmen (otherwise known as Quemoy) and they let you peer out of their bunkers at the coast of the mainland only some 2.3km (about a mile and a half) away. There, on a pleasant strand outside the mainland city of Xiamen, with its Henry Moore-style sculptures and tandems for hire, main-landers peer back: a young man rents out a giant pair of binoculars for 5 yuan (60 cents) a go. Competing slogans can be seen from afar: Sun Yat-sen's "three principles of the people" on the Taiwanese beach, Deng Xiao-ping's "one country, two systems" on the mainland one.