Word: quemoy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...whole globe there can hardly be two more intrinsically negligible pieces of real estate than Quemoy and Matsu, a pair of barren islands off the China coast. Yet history has an old trick of throwing its spotlight on obscure spots and thereby illuminating vast, half-hidden conflicts...
Spiked Spearhead. Meanwhile, the U.S. had diplomatic difficulties of its own in the form of a thorny negotiation with Chiang Kai-shek over the evacuation of the Tachen Islands. Last September the U.S. decided that the islands of Quemoy and Matsu were not militarily vital to the defense of Formosa. Later, as a condition to giving up the Tachens, Chiang demanded a public U.S. promise to defend Quemoy and Matsu. Politically, this was a reasonable condition, for with the Tachens gone, the other islands, as well as having tactical value, would become a test in the minds of free Asians...
Three times the U.S. was on the point of announcing that it would defend Quemoy and Matsu, but at the last moment Dwight Eisenhower, to soothe British fears, vetoed it. He thought U.S. intentions were already clear enough "to make certain that no conflict occurs through mistaken calculations on the other side . . . We have been as exact as it seems possible...
Their rights, Eden had made clear, definitely include in British eyes the offshore islands. Other Foreign Office spokesmen sketched in Eden's plan: to yield the offshore islands, including Quemoy, to the Communists in exchange for a promise to let Formosa alone. "What we want is 75 miles of blue water between the two contending parties," said one. Then, with boundaries tidied up and hostilities in abeyance, Chiang Kai-shek could be recognized as sovereign in Formosa, Mao Tse-tung in continental China, and both accorded recognition and eventual acceptance into the U.N. Assembly. This week, Russia announced guarded...
...Valuable Quemoy. The other island clusters are easier for Nationalist planes to protect, but none except the Pescadores are steppingstones to Formosa...