Kinmen, an Archipelago between Taiwan and China

Author: Alexandre Gandil

Publication date: September 2024

Publisher: Karthala

Total pages: 396

Price: €30

ISBN: 9782384091980

Kinmen, un archipel entre Taiwan et la Chine (“Kinmen, an archipelago between Taiwan and China” – Karthala, 2024) brings Kinmen 金門 back onto the map of the Taiwan Strait. Controlled by Taipei yet situated off the coast of China’s Fujian province (opposite the mainland city of Xiamen), this small archipelago has long been neglected by scholars of Taiwan studies, either consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, taking its specific case into consideration inevitably challenges widely accepted ideas in this field, such as a “(Mainland) China/Taiwan (Island)” divide structured by the median line of the Strait, or a synonymy between the nouns “Republic of China” and “Taiwan” as well as a congruence between the territorial entities named thereafter.

This monograph takes the opposite approach by deciding to shed light on this blind spot. Drawing on political sociology, comparative history, and a year of fieldwork, it examines the significance (or lack thereof) attributed by various actors to the border drawn between Kinmen and Xiamen in 1949. It explores the place and the role assigned to Kinmen inhabitants, as well as the place and the role Kinmen inhabitants have assigned to themselves, within the framework of cross-Strait relations since 1949. Cross-Strait relations bear a double meaning here: the conventional one, as the relations between the governments of Taipei and Beijing, but also as the relations between Taiwan Island and Kinmen, within the Republic of China itself. More broadly, this research uses the case of Kinmen to explore the intertwined processes of nation-state building, political territorialisation, and geographical imagination across the sinophone world – and beyond.

Chapter 1, “Kinmen, a Blind Spot in the Formosa Strait? Genealogy of a Political Construct”, delves into the mismatch between the real political cartography and the imagined cartography of the Taiwan Strait, treating this maritime space as a political construct. Following a diachronic approach, it explores how actors and observers have come to perceive the median line of the Taiwan Strait as a dividing line of Chinese unity, despite the borders resulting from China’s partition.

Chapters 2, “Together Apart. Kinmen and Taiwan in a Withdrawn Republic of China (1949–1992)”, and 3, “Kinmen at the Time of the ‘Republic of China (Taiwan)’ and of the ‘China-Taiwan Opposition’ (since 1992)”, trace the historical modes of domination imposed on Kinmen from 1949 to the present day. They focus on 1992 as a turning point, as the year martial law and military administration were lifted in Kinmen. The aim of these chapters is to capture the meaning the local population attributes to the territorial discontinuity of the state and to examine the tactics and strategies through which Kinmen’s residents assert themselves as agents of their own history.

Chapter 4, “Kinmen Beyond the Blind Spot. Exploring the Notion of the Interstice in Political Science”, builds on the previous two chapters to propose a definition of Kinmen as a case study in political science, extending beyond the Taiwan Strait. To this end, it questions concepts and notions such as overseas territories, insularity, and heterotopia.

These developments are followed by a conclusion offering an overall reassessment of the relationship between politics, history, and geography. The last pages recall how the specific case of Kinmen has enabled an analysis of the various ways political societies can accept, reject, or ignore what is given to them by history and nature. Therefore, this monograph posits that such a relationship should not be analysed in terms of primacy, but of mutual interaction. On an epistemological level, this research advocates for a critical approach to area studies. Any scholar of Taiwan studies who reads this book will gain a deeper understanding of the knowledge–power mechanisms that have contributed to Kinmen’s invisibility in this field. Consequently, they will no longer be able unconsciously to overlook Kinmen’s specific case.