Beijing has protested the death of two Chinese fishermen, whose boat capsized yesterday Wednesday when being chased by a Taiwanese patrol boat in the waters of Quemoy. According to the official Taipei agency, CNA, the Coast Guard of the Republic of China detected four men aboard a speedboat, about two kilometers east of the island of Beiding, one of the smallest in the Quemoy archipelago. also known as Kinmen.
This island under Taipei control is located 250 kilometers from the island of Taiwan, but less than eight kilometers from the nearest port in mainland China. The ROC patrol vessels demanded that the vessel stop for inspection but the crew chose to turn around to try to reach its home port. During the chase, the outboard boat capsized. Two of the crew were declared dead from drowning in Quemoy while two others could be revived and discharged.
The “cruel incident” has raised criticism in the People’s Republic of China, which claims to provide much more humane treatment to fishermen on the other side “who go astray,” compared to the guidelines of the sovereigntist party that governs Taipei. Reference has also been made to “sudden and dangerous maneuvers” by the Taiwanese coast guard.
These, for their part, accuse the Chinese on the other side of practicing fishing with explosives in waters they consider their own. On other occasions, these so-called fishing boats are dedicated to “fishing” sand for construction. The outboard in question, whose two survivors have been brought to justice, lacked a registration number, according to Taiwanese police.
A spokeswoman for Beijing has demanded that Taipei “immediately investigate” the event, “respect” fishing operations in the area of ??”fishermen from both sides of the Strait (of Formosa)” and “guarantee the personal safety” of the fishermen. Chinese to “prevent such incidents from happening again.”
The Quemoy archipelago has a dozen islets and islands, two of which are inhabited, while the rest are military fortifications. At some points, it is just two kilometers from the mainland Chinese metropolis of Xiamen and two hundred kilometers from Taiwan. In fact, the sixty thousand local inhabitants do not consider themselves Taiwanese. Their loyalty is to the Republic of China, made up of several archipelagos, as well as the island of Taiwan. The best known of them is Pescadores, while another, Matsu, shares with Quemoy the extreme proximity to the People’s Republic of China and the distance from Taiwan. from the main island of Taiwan. As well as the preponderance of the old Kuomintang, with much more votes there than the sovereignists of the Democratic Progressive Party.
The Quemoy Islands are currently a tourist destination for Taiwanese, but in the past they were a point of friction between Mao’s China and Chiang Kai-shek’s China. Unlike Formosa, today better known as Taiwan, the archipelago was never a colony of Japan. Twice in the 1950s, it came close to provoking a nuclear conflict.
Chiang Kai-shek stationed one hundred thousand soldiers there, who were to be the vanguard of a future reconquest of all of China. The seditious officer Agustín Muñoz Grandes, who led the Blue Division and was decorated by Hitler, also visited Quemoy at the invitation of Chiang Kai-shek. In fair correspondence, Taiwanese officials were invited to visit the Alcázar of Toledo during the Franco regime.
Until the end of the seventies, the Chinese on both sides continued to bomb each other daily, although with shells filled with propaganda instead of gunpowder. The communists, on odd days. The nationalists, the peers.
In recent weeks, it has returned to the limelight, due to alleged United States plans to remilitarize the archipelago, considered for decades as “the grenade in the tiger’s mouth.” Although taking it by force would be a piece of cake for the People’s Liberation Army, Beijing’s policy maintains that it will be reincorporated into the “motherland” at the same time as Taiwan and the other archipelagos.
Taipei even controls an atoll in the South China Sea, in addition to Taiping, the largest of the disputed Spratley islets. The Republic of China was, in fact, the first to claim practically the entire South China Sea, tracing, with eleven marks, the so-called “cow’s tongue”, later taken up, in a somewhat less excessive way, by the People’s Republic from China.
