Chinese travelers return to Kinmen, a Taiwanese island off mainland China

Remnants of a military conflict surround Zhang Zhong Jie's cafe.

The cafe is positioned in an abandoned military fortress, with the doorway surrounded by rusty tanks.

It is a scene that the residents of Taiwan's distant island of Kinmen know well. Everything that separates the Café from the Chinese mainland are 6 miles restless water and a series of anti-invasion spikes along the beach.

Despite the long -term tensions between Taiwan and China, tourists from the mainland were the primary source of income of the café since its opening in 2018.

“In the beginning we had regular group tourists – maybe at least two or three bus loads from travel agencies every day,” said Zhang.

But five years later, things look completely different.

Although China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, Chinese tourists have been prevented from visiting Taiwan for years.

In August 2019, Beijing prohibited individual travelers on Taiwan on the grounds that the connection between Taiwan and Taiwan was bad. In 2020, visiting tour groups was prohibited as a consequence of the Covid 19 pandemic.

For many on Kinmen, the shortage of Chinese visitors has been devastating.

“We hadn't had tourists from the mainland for years,” said Zhang. “The tourism industry in Kinmen has long been dependent on Chinese tourists, so the effects are definitely significant.”

In the mid -Twentieth century, Kinmen was on the forefront of China and Taiwan on the forefront.

Soldiers trained on its beaches, cities were stuffed with anti-communist propaganda, and bomb shelters were hidden in gardens.

But because the military presence in Kinmen diminished, the island increasingly shifted to tourism.

The residents didn’t draw back from the island's conflict-ridden past. Like Zhang, many opened cafes in former military fortifications, sold “war rations” in restaurants or made specialties “bomb knives” from old Chinese artillery mussels.

According to the Kinmen district government, Kinmen is about 2.9 kilometers from China – but greater than 110 kilometers from mainland Taiwanese.

Therefore, “the business in Kinmen generally depends on … connections to the Chinese mainland,” said local tour guide Chen Hua Sheng. Half -hour boat trips that connect the island to China are running again with China, but mostly might be stuffed with Taiwanese passengers because Chinese travelers weren’t allowed to go to.

With the top of Covid, many hoped that these boats would bring Chinese visitors back to Kinmen.

But on February 14, two Chinese residents were killed during a collision between a ship from the Taiwanese coast guard and a Chinese boat, which triggered an escalation of the tensions.

Chinese tourists at the moment are traveling to a few of Taiwan's distant islands, however the return of travelers to Kinmen has been slow. Figures from the mainland of Taiwan are that the variety of Chinese residents who entered the boat with the Boot Kinmen fell from greater than 400,000 in 2019 to lower than 18,000 in 2023.

For Wu Zeng Yun, CEO of the Governmental Kinmen-Matsu Joint Services Center, the shortage of tourists was interpreted as punishment of Beijing, he said.

With [cut?] Local business owners have felt the consequences of the lack of Chinese tourists who previously contributed almost 200 million US dollars to Kinmen's annual economy.

Noodle shop owner Beddy Chang said Chinese visitors once made up 80% of her customer base. Without them, she has now turned to exporting products abroad, she said.

Others corresponding to Wu Zeng Yun – whose family once made Kinmen's “bomb knife” to tourists and sold them – shifted their shops to the primary island of Taiwan.

“Without mainland tourists, we will go out of business,” Wu said. “We regularly host events in department stores across Taiwan.”

But others were less lucky.

After the previous restaurant owner Lu Wen Shiung had made his business, he began fishing and offering boat tours to enhance his income. But that too was difficult, he said.

After the February 14 incident, the Chinese Coast Guard significantly increased its presence within the region, deploying into Kinmen's restricted waters on multiple occasions, conducting military exercises in May and even boarding a Taiwanese tour boat in February.

When he stood in his small boat within the narrow sea between Kinmen and China, Lu said that he had experienced these escalations first -hand.

He showed videos he filmed on his cellphone of Chinese coast guard ships approaching him as he navigated the waters around Kinmen.

“There is a little concern that if we are absorbed in our waters, we could be exposed to unconventional treatment,” said Lu and stared over the waves.

At the top of July, the Taiwanese and Chinese authorities achieved an agreement on the boat incident on February 14, which enabled the corpses of the Dead Chinese fishermen to return to the mainland.

In late August, local Kinmen legislator Chen Yu Jen traveled to Beijing to debate resuming tourism to Kinmen. She was told that Chinese tourists would soon return.

The first group of mainland tourists arrived in Kinmen end of September, based on local media.

The 22 individuals who arrived for a two -day visit don’t represent an entire return of Chinese tourism, however it is a starting. However, some in Kinmen expressed skepticism that the situation would ever return what it was once.

But the local guide Chen is optimistic, he said.

“We hope that mainland Chinese can visit Taiwan and Kinmen again to promote economic development on both sides.”

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