Quemoy as Method: A Front-line Island on a New Front-line

For almost half a century, the small island of Quemoy (Kinmen) in the Taiwan Straits had been the front-line of the unfinished Chinese civil war and the global Cold War. At the time of the event, the residents of Quemoy found themselves on a new and very different front-line: the front-line of a rising China. Virtually every local interest and issue had been entangled in some way with China. Conventional approaches to the rise of China in terms of opportunities and threat had failed to capture the realities of life on Quemoy, which demanded new analytic approaches. This same entanglement was expected to increasingly shape life in Taiwan, in the region, and around the world, making Quemoy a potentially important site for theorizing the local implications of China’s global rise.

 

 

Michael Szonyi is the Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. A social historian of late imperial and modern China, his books include The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China (2017) and Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (2008).  His most recent works are The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations (co-edited with Adele Carrai and Jennifer Rudolph, 2022) and Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present (co-edited with Tarun Khanna, 2022).  He received his B.A. from University of Toronto and his D.Phil. from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.  He has also studied at National Taiwan University and Xiamen University.  He is currently writing a modern history of rural China and a study of a remarkable trove of local documents found in Yongtai County, China.  In 2024, he was named an “Honorary Villager of Yongtai”.