The armed forces of 470,000 include about 330,000 soldiers. There is also a militia of 100,000. The Army has Hawk and Nike-Hercules missiles. Eighty thousand troops are deployed on Quemoy and Ma-tsu islands, within swimming distance of China's Amoy harbor. Army reserves total about 1 million.
The United States and China were engaged at the time in a war of words over Quemoy and Ma-tsu, tiny islands off the coast of China still occupied by the Nationalists. The Soviets had just shot down an American spy plane over the Soviet Union, and the Paris Summit meeting in the spring of 1960 between Eisenhower, Macmillan, De Gaulle and Khrushchev had ended in angry words. All this heightened the fear of war in Japan. To tie up so closely with "war-loving" America when China was the closest neighbor involved great risk that Japan could become the Quemoy and Ma-tsu of the 1960s.
1992, Gregory W. Pedlow, Donald E. Welzenbach, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954–1974[3], Washington, D.C., →ISBN, →OCLC, page 229[4]:
The Nationalist Government reported a massive buildup of PRC troops and aircraft in Fukien Province opposite the Nationalist-held Quemoy and Ma-tsu Islands.
1992, Richard Louis Edmonds, “The Changing Geography of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau”, in Graham P. Chapman, Kathleen M. Baker, editors, The Changing Geography of Asia[5], Routledge, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 160:
Since 1949, Taiwan has remained under Nationalist (Kuomintang) control along with the off-shore islands of Chin-men (Kinmen) and Ma-tsu (Lien-chiang County) in Fujian Province. Chin-men and Lien-chiang County are to end their period of direct military rule and to elect their first country magistrates in 1993.
1999, Peter Chen-main Wang, “A Bastion Created, A Regime Reformed, An Economy Reengineered, 1949-1970”, in Murray A. Rubinstein, editor, Taiwan: A New History[6], M.E. Sharpe, →ISBN, →OCLC, →OL, page 326:
Although the PRC had taken I-chiang-shan island and forced the withdrawal of Nationalist troops from Ta-chen island in early 1955, it failed to take the two most important offshore islands — Quemoy and Ma-tsu — by heavy bombardment in 1958.
