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

Remnants of military conflict surround Zhang Zhong Jie’s cafe.

The coffee shop sits within an abandoned military fortification, its entrance surrounded by rusting tanks.

It’s a scene the citizens of Taiwan’s remote Kinmen Island know well. All that separates the cafe from mainland China are 6 miles of choppy water and a row of anti-invasion spikes along the beach.

Despite the long-standing tensions between Taiwan and China, tourists from the mainland were the cafe’s main source of revenue since it opened in 2018.

“In the beginning, we had regular group tourists — perhaps at least two or three busloads from travel agencies every day,” Zhang said.

But five years on, things look very different.

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

In August 2019, Beijing blocked individual travelers from visiting Taiwan, citing poor cross-strait relations. In 2020, tour groups were banned from visiting because of Covid-19 pandemic.

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

“We haven’t had mainland tourists for years,” Zhang said. “The tourism industry in Kinmen has long been heavily reliant on Chinese tourists, so the impact is definitely significant.”

In the mid-20th century, Kinmen was on the front line of China’s conflict with Taiwan.

Soldiers trained on its beaches, towns were filled with anti-Communist propaganda, and bomb shelters were tucked away in gardens.

But as the military presence in Kinmen subsided, the island pivoted toward tourism.

Residents didn’t shy from the island’s conflict-ridden past. Like Zhang, many opened cafes in former military fortifications, sold “war rations” in restaurants or made specialty “bomb knives” out of old Chinese artillery shells.

Kinmen is roughly 1.8 miles from China, according to the Kinmen County Government — but more than 110 miles from the Taiwanese mainland.

As a result, “business in Kinmen generally depends heavily on… links with mainland China,” said local tour guide Chen Hua Sheng. Half-hour-long boat rides that connect the island with China are running again, but have been mostly filled with Taiwanese passengers since Chinese travelers weren’t allowed to visit Kinmen.

With the end of Covid, many hoped those boats would ferry Chinese visitors back to Kinmen once more.

But on Feb. 14, two Chinese citizens were killed during a collision between a Taiwanese Coast Guard boat and a Chinese boat, sparking an escalation of tensions.

Chinese tourists are now traveling to some of Taiwan’s remote islands, but the return of travelers to Kinmen has been slow. Figures from Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council show that the number of Chinese nationals entering Kinmen by boat dropped from more than…