XIAMEN, China -- Like a suitor wooing a long-lost mate, this port city in southeastern China primps itself for the object of its desire: the decidedly wealthier island of Taiwan, only 100 miles away by water but separated from Xiamen by more than four decades of political hostility.
Construction workers here move in double-time compared with much of the rest of mainland China, expanding Xiamen's roads, ports, airport and industrial facilities. A 20th century town is beginning to bloom over the skeleton of the city's colonial past.
Gleaming private villas sprout from hillsides. Expensive sing-along bars dot street corners. Peddlers accept Taiwanese currency. Young girls -- the locals call them "chickens" -- gather in the city's coffee bars in the afternoon looking for lucrative liaisons with Taiwanese men.
And Xiamen's taxi drivers honk, honk, honk their car horns in a way drivers do nowhere else in China, as if to say "Hurry up, time is money, and more Taiwanese money means there may be a big wedding here some day, a historic reunion of Communist China and its Nationalist enemies across the water."
For decades after the Nationalists fled to Taiwan to re-establish their capitalist Republic of China in 1949, both sides hurled shells at each other from nearby islands in the Taiwan Strait. The last shots were fired in 1984. Now the salvos are financial.
"Investment follows the potential for profit -- that's not communism or capitalism, just a fact," proclaimed a Xiamen deputy mayor, Zhang Zongxu, cryptically summarizing the first part of the strategy by which the mainland hopes to retake Taiwan.
Chen Kongli of Xiamen University's Taiwan Research Institute provided the final part of that long-term logic: "Taiwan is a commercial society. Its policies are determined by the opinions of its businessmen. If Taiwan is financially integrated with the mainland, then political integration may follow."
But political reunification, the long-stated official goal of authorities on both sides of the strait, remains as much as TC generation away.
But, in the meantime, Xiamen's proximity to the island, its favorable tax and investment policies for foreigners, its cheap labor and the fact that its Chinese dialect and customs are similar to those on Taiwan already have succeeded in luring thousands of Taiwanese here and a flow of capital that is markedly heating up the complex political mating dance between Beijing and Taipei.
