In the China studies field, military and social history exist independently of one another. Michael Szonyi, however, effectively uses the former to elucidate the latter in this first detailed account in English of Quemoy. Quemoy (Jinmen) is a small island off the coast of Fujian Province that played an important role in the conflict between Mao Zedong's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. Szonyi, a historian of Ming-Qing social history, does not rehash old debates over great power politics, but instead uses Jinmen—Szonyi refers to the island by that name throughout the book, despite the title—as a way to examine everyday life in a war zone. He presents the fighting of 1949 and the cross-Strait crises of 1954–55 and 1958 as the context for intensified efforts at regimentation by the state and for subtle resistance by the island's inhabitants. This study, which utilizes interviews with inhabitants of Jinmen and research on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, is useful to anyone who is interested in the history of the Cold War, civil-military relations, and state building in China.
Four mutually reinforcing processes shaped Cold War Jinmen: militarization, geopoliticization, modernization, and memory. Militarization, here defined as the integration of military prerogatives into almost all aspects of daily life, proved inseparable from the long-term state-building work of the Nationalists. The army governed the island through the War Zone Administration (WZA), a structure even more regimented and authoritarian than Taiwan under martial law. The Nationalists justified the WZA by explaining that it formed part of the plan for China's political development envisioned by Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. Militarization was bolstered by what Szonyi calls geopoliticization, the process by which international conflicts dominated politics, economics, culture, and society on the island. Simply put, the residents of Jinmen were forced to react to Cold War struggles and Nationalist policies that had little to do with them.
Two contending trends influenced modernization, another of Szonyi's organizing concepts. The Nationalists hoped that they could make Jinmen into a showcase for the benefits of Chiang's rule as part of an anticommunist propaganda campaign. However, the island's economic development and the people's standard of living were influenced as much by short-term military necessity and the presence of thousands of soldiers as by central government policies. In this context, Jinmen offers a case study of how local communities interact with large military bases—a phenomenon seen around the world during the Cold War.
The Nationalists sought to manage the memory of Jinmen's history and its Cold War experience by emphasizing the island's ties to China and the ideal of shared sacrifice in the name of national salvation. As they did on the mainland, and then on Taiwan, Chiang and his backers also defined the Nationalist Party as “the defender and guardian of traditional Chinese culture, and in turn of the Chinese nation” (p. 187). Even religion was redefined in the service of Chiang's regime. For example, the Nationalists promoted local shrines dedicated to “Patriotic Generals,” military leaders who had died on Jinmen. Szonyi shows how attempts to create the history of the island's Cold War experience spawned a counternarrative that focused on the annoyances and the injustices of the Nationalist rule. Islanders also recalled their resourcefulness while under fire and their ability to evade some of the more onerous demands of the state. Szonyi de-romanticizes the Cold War experience, noting that the conflict “is remembered today less as an ideological confrontation than in terms of the minutiae of struggles of everyday life” (p. 5).
Through these four concepts, Cold War Island effectively connects Jinmen to Nationalist ideology and to measures originating on the mainland. However, it is worth remembering that Taiwan was the source of much practical experience that shaped the implementation of policies on the offshore islands. It was on Taiwan that the Nationalists first made a concerted push to create the compliant citizens they had dreamed of ruling on the mainland. For example, the Nationalists' attempt to make Jinmen a Three Principles of the People Model County in the 1960s grew out of an ideology forged on the mainland, and also the efforts to make Taiwan into a model province, which began in 1949.
The same geopolitical forces that gave such significance to Jinmen faded in the 1960s. As changing Communist diplomatic and military strategies ended most combat across the Strait, interest in the island declined. Beginning in the 1990s, offshore islands such as Jinmen regained some importance as conduits for cross-Strait contact. Now that direct links between Taiwan and the mainland are growing, however, Jinmen has again dropped from the headlines. Szonyi's book reminds us why the island mattered during the 1950s and 1960s, and offers a detailed description of the local impact of Cold War conflict.
