evidence: On 1 September last year, in the wake of the tensions created by the US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in early August, a Chinese drone was shot down for the first time over Taiwanese territory. It was not downed over the island of Taiwan itself, but on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, over Kinmen, a small group of islands that is part-encircled by the Chinese coastline. Sometimes known in the West as Quemoy, Kinmen is on the face of it insignificant — it is no bigger than Liechtenstein and has a population scarcely larger than Folkestone’s (in the UK). There are 12 islands in the group, only two of which — Kinmen Island proper (134 sq km) and Lieyu Island (13 sq km), also known as Lesser Kinmen Island — have permanent civilian populations, estimated at between 50,000 and 60,000. Nevertheless, it continues to feel the tension created by its geographical location and its political affiliation, itself the result of a partition of China concretised in the early 1950s.