For many Chinese, there are ‘more important things’ than Taiwan unification

Beijing has not ruled out using force to annex Taiwan, but there is little appetite for war among Chinese people.

“It is difficult to imagine that this used to be a warzone,” 23-year-old *Shao Hongtian told Al Jazeera as he wandered along a beach near the city of Xiamen on China’s southeast coast.

Halting by the water’s edge where gentle waves lapped against the sand, Shao gestured beyond the shallows towards the sea and the Kinmen archipelago – now peaceful, but in the 1940s and 1950s, a battleground.

The communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and the nationalists of the Kuomintang (KMT) fled Beijing for the island of Taiwan. It was on Kinmen, the main island of the archipelago of the same name, less than 10km (6.2 miles) from the coast of China, that the nationalists repulsed repeated communist invasion attempts, but not before the fighting had wreaked havoc on both Xiamen and Kinmen.

Kinmen and its outlying islets – some of which lie even closer to the Chinese coast – have been a part of Taiwan’s territory ever since.

Chinese citizens like Shao were once able to get tourist visas to visit the islands, but that ended with the pandemic.