CHINA AND Taiwan have agreed to remove underwater military barricades and let 100 people swim from one side to the other in one of the most powerful symbols of warmer relations between the cross-strait rivals.
The swimmers will cross the 8.5km stretch between the mainland Chinese city of Xiamen and Little Kinmen, an outlying island ruled by Taiwan, in what is the first military agreement between the two sides, on August 15th.
“The bigger meaning is that this is a competition for peace,” Kinmen county magistrate Lee Zhu-feng told a news conference. “We want peace, not war.” Escorted by coast guard vessels from each side, about 100 professional swimmers, 50 from each side, will go one way from Xiamen. Next year another 100 swimmers, 50 from each side, plan to do the route in reverse in what could become an annual event, organisers said.
The Taiwanese military will remove anti-ship landing barricades from the area, a legacy of a battle in 1949 when the People’s Liberation Army tried to stage a landing.
The Taiwanese are engaged in a major programme to clear landmines from the beaches of Kinmen, which is the closest point between the two sides.
Kinmen has critical strategic and military value and remains heavily guarded, its beaches covered with spikes to stop landing craft, but fears of invasion are ebbing since Taiwan’s president Ma Ying-jeou took office in May and tensions have eased.
Relations between China and Taiwan were strained under Mr Ma’s predecessor Chen Shui-bian, who had a firmly pro-independence stance, much to the irritation of Beijing.
Mr Ma has made improving ties with China one of the main priorities of his administration. Since Mr Ma came to power, Beijing and Taipei have signed nine agreements on economic co-operation, including deals on direct flights and other trade deals.
Between 1954 and 1978, there was constant bombardment of the Kinmen archipelago, also known as Quemoy, by the mainlanders, who rained down two million shells on the island, 480,000 of them in the first two days of the bombing. Some 30,000 artillery shells fell in 30 minutes, and a local craftsman has made a nice business for himself making high-precision cooking knives out of the shell casings that litter the island. The main island of Taiwan is about 160km from China.
China has claimed Taiwan since Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang fled there in 1949, after they lost the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists.