The knife-maker of Kinmen island, Wu Tseng-dong, has an unusual business model. When he was a boy, in the 1950s, he witnessed explosive shells – launched from the Chinese mainland two miles away – falling on his birthplace. As he explains: “479,000 rounds were fired in 44 days. We lived in fear.” Little did Wu Tseng-dong know then, but the People’s Liberation Army was supplying him with the raw material for his future livelihood: today he makes knives from those shells to sell to tourists from the mainland.
Reporter Jane Corbin’s gripping analysis of rising tensions between the People’s Republic of China (capital: Beijing; leader: Xi Jinping; population: 1.4 billion) and the Republic of China (capital: Taipei; current leader: Tsai Ing-wen; population: 23 million) examines the possibility of history not just repeating itself, but of tensions escalating so far as to cause the return to geopolitical discourse of that quaint old term, nuclear Armageddon. In this scenario, Beijing bombards not just the little island of Kinmen (slightly bigger than Bute), but Taiwan itself (roughly the size of Switzerland), in order to reunify China. But it thereby embroils the US, provoking a worldwide conflict that would, so far as I understand it, depress global economic growth predictions even more than the coronavirus pandemic.
