Word: quemoy
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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...
...Quemoy was once a barren outpost, but Chiang Kai-shek is said to have decreed in 1951: "Make it green." So the Nationalists have planted 70 million seedling trees, mostly Australian pine. They have since added bananas, mangoes, pears and apples. There are fields of corn and sorghum that help to make the island's 62,000 civilian inhabitants self-sufficient. The island even has a frail industrial base, a pottery plant and a liquor distillery. "For the soldiers, we have a lot of peanut candy shops and billiard parlors," a guide remarks...
Hidden Guns. Driving along the modern paved highways that crisscross Quemoy, one can imagine the island as a bucolic, semitropical retreat, but under the lush greenery are machine-gun and artillery emplacements, truck depots, trenches, and the gaping mouths of tunnels that honeycomb the hills. Blasted out of solid rock, these tunnels are 25 by 35 ft., large enough so that tanks and trucks can drive for miles inside them. One tunnel where the molelike troops are quartered contains half a mile of double-decked bunks. There is even a 1,000-seat theater hollowed out of the granite. Everywhere...
This new policy left military bases surrounding China on South Korea, Japan, Quemoy-Matsu, and Taiwan. American theoreticians led by John Foster Dulles (and lauded by Congressman Richard Nixon) calculated that the spread of communism had to be stopped from reaching South East Asia, gold mine for new international markets and cheap labor. Without hesitation, America stepped up its support of the French war in Indo-China and took over the load in 1954. Later in the 60's, Secretary of State Dean Rusk staunchly supported this dual policy of containment of China and "protection of American interests...
...hand over Taiwan, Dr. Paul Lin of McGill University, Canadian citizen who lived in China from 1949-64 and spent five months there in 1970 notes that America is still building up B-52 bases on Taiwan. In addition Dr. Lin stresses that the recent Japanese-American agreement returning Quemoy-Matsu to the Japanese escalates China's encirclement. The agreement returns Quemoy-Matsu to the Japanese fully armed with American arms and personnel. On the other hand, Nixon might well have calculated the treaty as a bone thrown to the Japanese so they won't complain when America control...