Could Communist China and the Republic of China be about to come to blows over a cluster of small islands several miles from China’s Fujian Province? After having left Quemoy and nearby Matsu alone for decades, the communists are suddenly harassing them in an atmosphere of near-crisis.

For 32 minutes, Chinese coast guardsmen frightened a ferry boat packed with tourists from the Republic of China-governed province of Taiwan, more than 100 miles to the east across the Taiwan Straits.

The tourists, 23 of them plus 11 crew members, feared they were about to be arrested and sent to unknown fates in the Chinese mainland prison system after the Chinese coast guard stopped the ferry on its way to the scenic island.

Before the Chinese let the ferry  go, their actions “harmed people’s feelings, created panic and went against the best interests of people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” Taiwan’s ocean affairs minister, Kuan Bi-ling, said. 

Now the Nationalist Chinese regime in Taipei and the Communist one in Beijing are letting one another know the risks of such conduct. Taiwan announced that it had driven away two Chinese coast guard vessels, and the Chinese have been warning of the consequences of “provocations” ever since the deaths of two Chinese fishermen whose boat capsized in a high-speed chase to get away from the Taiwanese coast guard.

“Taiwan’s arrogance led to this vicious incident,” the English-language Communist Chinese propaganda newspaper Global Times thundered. “This incident serves as a warning to the Taiwan authorities,” the paper inveighed. “They simply do not have the capital to cause trouble in the Taiwan Straits. The mainland’s counteract capability is overwhelming.”

The Taiwan coast guard has often stopped Chinese fishing boats poaching in waters around Quemoy and Matsu, but no one would doubt the power of Communist China to defeat Taiwan in a battle so close to the mainland. The question, as tensions heat up, is: Why has Beijing let the islands remain under Taiwan’s control ever since Mao Zedong’s Red Army defeated the Kuomintang or Nationalist forces of Chiang Kaishek in 1949?

Quemoy, Matsu, and a few nearby islets, while occupied by Republic of China troops, are not even a part of Taiwan, which President Biden has committed to defend. They make up a county of Fujian Province, whose glistening office towers and busy harbor are visible across the waters from Quemoy.

After having shelled Quemoy and Matsu intermittently after taking over the mainland, Beijing appears to have simply tired of the idea of recovering them in what might turn into a brutal conflict near its own shores. Incredibly, tourists from the mainland visit the islands along with tourists from Taiwan,  looking at fortifications and tunnels that now seem outdated.

For China, the cost of attacking and conquering the islands might be prohibitively high, a University of Kentucky professor, Robert Farley, writes in the National Interest. An operation against Quemoy and Matsu would be “a dangerous gamble for the PRC,” the People’s Republic of China, he believes. “Both Washington and Tokyo could make Beijing pay an economic price for such brinkmanship.”

Mr. Farley notes, though, that China is vastly stronger militarily than it was during a succession of crises surrounding the islands in the 1960s and 1970s. “In 1955 and again in 1958, China and the United States came dangerously close to active combat over control of Quemoy and Matsu,” he writes. 

Finally, “Taiwan and China settled into a desultory pattern of bombarding one another on alternate days of the week, a practice that continued into the 1970s,” Mr. Farley says. By now, the “expansion of China’s air and sea power has made such an operation feasible.” Are the Chinese spoiling for a showdown? Not necessarily.

“We should have confidence in the handling of the Taiwan question by our national professional team,” Global Times advised. “The stronger our economic and technological capabilities, the more initiative we will have in the Taiwan Straits and international competition.”