Word: matsu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...screen argument between the candidates was less than edifying at the time and now echoes with irony. A disproportionate amount of time was taken up by the tiny Nationalist Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu, some five miles off the mainland Chinese coast. Nixon argued that they should be defended by the U.S. against any Communist attack; Kennedy insisted that they should be defended only if assaulted in a clear prelude to an invasion of Taiwan, some 100 miles across the Formosa Strait. Also argued excessively was the issue of U.S. prestige. Kennedy contended that it had fallen dangerously throughout...
Perhaps the Republican Convention at Kansas City will change everything and turn Panama and Rhodesia into the Quemoy and Matsu of 1976. If not, you can shortly expect a loss of benignity from editorial writers, analysts and columnists, who, unlike the television cameras, need issues and not images on which to feed and ruminate. Tired of forever analyzing each candidate's appeal or parsing his pat answers, these critics will be talking instead about the campaign's lack of content...
...leaders agreed that the question of future U.S. control over the Panama Canal was a phony issue, no more valid than the argument in the John Kennedy-Richard Nixon race in 1960 over whether the U.S. should have defended the Nationalist Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Rhodes told Ford to stop "chasing this goddam rainbow of the Panama Canal." He meant Ford should stop talking about...
Nearly two decades ago, the U.S. almost went to war over the Chinese offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu. "If you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost," Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said of the crisis, thus arousing anxious critics to denounce him for what they called "brinkmanship." Today, these half-forgotten pinpoints of land rank with the Rock of Gibraltar and the Maginot Line as among the world's most notable military anachronisms. Yet they are still guarded by an intrepid army of some 100,000 Chinese Nationalists, who are sporadically shelled every...
...necessary, and that unification with the mainland may be inevitable. Back on Taiwan, where younger bureaucrats and even some young legislators are quietly discussing the changes that will come when Mao and Chiang are gone, one official observes: "We need low-income housing more than we need Quemoy and Matsu." Some day, another Nationalist predicts, Quemoy will be a park...