Written by Chengyu Yang
Image credit: Thousands of passengers stranded in the departure hall of Kinmen Airport due to heavy fog, 7 April 2026. Photograph by Chengyu Yang.
On 27 July 2026, around 600 stranded passengers crowded into a waiting area outside the standby counters at Kinmen Airport, a space smaller than two basketball courts. For these travellers, most of whom were families from Taiwan proper, the wait was the third day of a disrupted journey. According to the Central News Agency, Typhoon Noul had suspended the Kinmen-Xiamen and Kinmen-Quanzhou Mini Three Links passenger services on 25 July, causing them to miss their connecting flights from Kinmen to Taiwan that day. When the ferry services finally resumed on 26 July and brought them back to Kinmen, every flight to Taiwan had already been sold out three weeks earlier. After a sleepless night, their chances of leaving Kinmen depended entirely on ticketed passengers abandoning their journeys at the last minute.
At 3 p.m. that same day, the live display above the standby counters showed that only 18 passengers had secured seats over the previous 8 hours. Most were high-tier airline loyalty-card holders, and the rest had waited through almost the entire night, taking up positions outside the terminal before 4.30 a.m. so that they would be near the front of the queue when the airport opened. Because a missed standby call meant forfeiting one’s place, the stranded passengers could scarcely leave the waiting area. The smell of instant noodles mingled with sweat as it passed from body to body. Fully booked flights departed through the rain every twenty minutes, while the figure for ‘successful standby passengers’ remained unchanged on the board for hours.
Anxiety accumulated and spread through the space.
At 3.40 p.m., the pressure that had gathered in the standby hall over two days finally erupted. When ground staff announced, once again, that every passenger on the next flight to Taipei had checked in, a woman in her forties pressed her lips together and strode towards an employee who was about to leave. Raising her voice, she accused the government and the airlines of abandoning the stranded passengers. The previously noisy hall suddenly fell silent. Other standby passengers gathered around, holding up their phones and blocking the employee’s way as they demanded a response from the airline. The furious crowd chanted, “We want to go home! We want to go home!”
After news outlets circulated footage of the ‘We want to go home’ protest, it prompted a wide discussion among Kinmen residents on social media. Sympathy for the stranded passengers was scarce; many comments condemned the disorder surrounding the incident. Kai, who runs a restraint business in Houpu, was among the Kinmen residents who criticised the passengers online. Visibly agitated, he showed me the video on his phone as the incident unfolded. “Do you think we are pleased to see so many visitors? We wish they would stay away altogether.” He waved his hand and pointed towards the airport. “The more people arrive, the harder life becomes for us. The Mini Three Links are booming, while Kinmen declines by the day.”
Kai’s complaint echoes a wider frustration. On this border archipelago, where tourism and services became central to the economy after the lifting of martial law, residents once expected local consumption generated by human movement to sustain their livelihoods. Immigration Agency statistics indicate that Mini Three Links movements through Kinmen nearly doubled, from 573,000 in the first half of 2024 to 1.08 million in the first half of 2026. This intensified mobility has brought little local return. Between 2024 and 2025, Mini Three Links movements rose by 41.5%. Passenger throughput at Kinmen Airport grew by 3.3%, occupied room-nights in general hotels by 4.3%, and their total revenue by 2.0%, according to statistics from the Tourism Administration. Local food businesses such as Kai’s are even more pessimistic. “I have given up hoping for the boom years of group tourism in the 2010s. Even since the pandemic, our annual income has barely held steady, and quite a few businesses around us have gone backwards.”
Why have steadily rising passenger numbers since the pandemic left Kinmen’s local service industries in increasingly difficult conditions? On an island where tourism serves as a principal economic engine, why have relations between residents and travellers passing through Kinmen grown more tense? Drawing on my ethnographic research in Kinmen, this essay approaches these questions through the perspective of infrastructure under maritime conditions.
To understand the anger that Kinmen residents such as Kai direct towards visitors, we need to begin with the polished narrative of Kinmen’s ‘tourism recovery.’ Mini Three Links passenger traffic numbers rebounded rapidly after the pandemic. Kinmen’s Shuitou Port processed around 1.3 million passenger movements in 2024; by 2025, the figure had risen to 1.84 million, an annual increase of 41.5%. The newly busy port and airport readily evoke memories of the pre-pandemic years, when group tourists from China entered Kinmen and spent money there.
Transit Passengers (中轉客): When the Island Becomes a Cross-Strait Passage
“At mealtimes, almost every restaurant had a queue, and tour buses kept coming,” An-Hsien recalled. As a young man, he trained in a Taipei restaurant before running an Italian restaurant in central Kinmen for fifteen years. “I had assumed that nobody would travel to Kinmen for ‘Western’ food, especially with my restaurant tucked away in such an out-of-the-way place. Those tour groups taught me a lesson,” An-Hsien told me with a self-deprecating laugh.
The recovery numbers after the pandemic have brought fresh headaches. The statistical category ‘entering Kinmen’ encompasses several forms of movement. Citing Immigration Agency data from 2024 to June 2025, Kinmen County Councillor Tung Sen-Po observed that Taiwanese travellers accounted for 81.85% of Mini Three Links entries and exits, while Chinese travellers accounted for 16.18%. Drawing on the everyday border-crossing figures for Kinmen residents, he further estimated that Taiwanese ‘transit passengers’ might account for around 60% of the total flow. Many Taiwanese travellers, whom local residents refer to as transit passengers, now use Kinmen as an interchange on their way to China. They usually arrive at Kinmen Airport on a cheaper domestic flight, travel onwards to Shuitou Port, and then take the roughly thirty-minute ferry journey to Xiamen or Quanzhou.
Price differences and policy have jointly propelled this transit route. A market comparison conducted in July 2026 placed the combined one-way cost of flying from Taipei to Kinmen, travelling overland and taking the Kinmen-Xiamen ferry at around NT$3,400. A direct flight from Taipei to Xiamen during the same period cost more than NT$7,300.
Taiwanese government’s restrictions on tour groups travelling to China have also fostered a practice locally known as ‘individual entry, group departure.’ Securing seats on the same direct flight for an entire tour group under individual bookings is more difficult. Travel agencies therefore privately instruct Taiwanese tour members to reach Kinmen according to individual capacity, assemble there, and complete the cross-border group journey with collectively purchased Mini Three Links ferry tickets.
This growth in transit traffic diverges sharply from local economic indicators. Between the first halves of 2024 and 2026, Mini Three Links movements nearly doubled, while total revenue among Kinmen’s general hotels grew only in the single digits. Kinmen has consequently taken on the work of transferring passengers between Taiwan’s aviation network and cross-border maritime transport. Travellers from Taiwan move rapidly across the island, bypassing some regulatory constraints and taking advantage of price differences on domestic flights. Kinmen itself has become the infrastructure through which Taiwanese travellers cross the Strait.
Intake, Transfer and Release: The Desynchronised Rhythm of Air-Sea ‘Breathing’ under Maritime Conditions
For Kinmen to keep operating as the infrastructure of a cross-sea passage, its airport, roads and cross-border ferry services must work continuously and rhythmically together. Travellers fly from Taiwan proper to Kinmen and continue to Xiamen through Shuitou Port. On the return journey, they enter Kinmen by ferry from Xiamen and then board domestic flights to Taiwan. When the system runs smoothly, flight and ferry timetables allow Kinmen to continuously receive, transfer, and release transit passengers. The island thus takes on a rhythm resembling breath: one mode of transport carries passengers into the island, and another takes up the unfinished part of their journey.
Nonetheless, maritime weather conditions frequently unsettle this rhythmic intake and release, rendering Kinmen’s infrastructure often unstable. During a short period of my ethnographic fieldwork, dense fog halted ferry and air services simultaneously on 1 March 2026. On 7 April, fog closed Kinmen Airport while the Mini Three Links ferries continued bringing several thousand passengers into Kinmen. Large numbers of travellers preparing to fly to Taiwan were stranded on the island, rapidly placing standby registration, accommodation and next-day evacuation under pressure. The July typhoon caused desynchronisation in another direction. The Kinmen-Xiamen and Kinmen-Quanzhou ferries stopped on 25 July. After services resumed on the 26th, large numbers of Taiwan-bound transit passengers entered Kinmen, where domestic flights were already operating close to full capacity. Around 600 people subsequently gathered at the airport to wait for standby seats.
Such weather disruptions place pressure on Kinmen’s transport system because maritime and air services enter different operating states within particular windows of time. The airport and port also follow their own safety standards. Kinmen Port’s operating rules allow the authorities to suspend arrivals and departures when waves reach two metres, average winds reach Force 8, or visibility falls below 800 metres. Aviation depends on approach procedures, runway visual range, aircraft equipment, crew qualifications, crosswinds and each airline’s dispatch decision. Judgements by authorities, airlines, and the port across the Strait also shape the precise timing of every suspension and resumption. The direction of desynchronisation therefore shifts with weather conditions, remaining capacity and administrative decisions.
When one transport mode continues to receive passengers while another temporarily loses the capacity to move them onwards, Kinmen begins to accumulate people whose journeys were meant to pass quickly through the island. Travellers enter standby lists at the airport and port, and a brief interchange stretches into a wait of uncertain duration. What I call ‘breathing infrastructure’ is this coordinated process of intake, transfer, release and blockage. Weather triggers changes in rhythm and slows down the breathing of infrastructure; ticketing systems, capacity allocation and emergency arrangements then determine how long the accumulation will persist.
Kinmen’s Anxiety over Inter-Island Mobility and Their Livelihood Predicament
In my case, Kinmen performs three roles at once: a home where local residents conduct their lives, a tourist destination that draws visitors to stay, and an infrastructure that helps cross-Strait travellers complete cross-border journeys. These roles share limited transport capacity and administrative resources, and they face the same maritime weather conditions and transport disruptions.
The island’s infrastructural role has altered residents’ inter-island lives. Transit passengers place pressure on the transport resources residents need to reach Taiwan for medical care, education and family care, as well as those used by travellers who genuinely intend to visit Kinmen.
Under the Taiwanese government’s current resolution, a portion of seats is reserved for registered Kinmen residents to protect their mobility rights. The quota for Kinmen residents just rose to 30%. During some busy periods, the county government also controls emergency seats for medical and funeral travel. Airlines also commonly defend the existing quota by calculating Kinmen residents’ annual travel demand as a share of overall ticket use.
Attending to the breathing of island infrastructure reveals how current adjustments to overall capacity and its distribution have left Kinmen’s mobility predicament unresolved and further politicised the mobility needs of residents and travellers, while the existing approach overlooks the rhythms and operating rules of the island itself as infrastructure.
Understanding island infrastructure through breathing also helps explain why airport conflicts within Kinmen’s current sea-air system so readily develop into tensions between residents and travellers from Taiwan proper. Kinmen is caught in a mobility dilemma built into the rhythm of transit. During periods of smooth circulation, transit passengers move rapidly through the island, leaving only limited economic value behind. Their journeys, estimated to account for around 60% of Mini Three Links passenger movements, also place considerable pressure on Kinmen’s finite transport system.
Once intake and release fall out of rhythm, the same flow begins to accumulate. Fare structures, cross-border traffic, shifting weather, and capacity shortages then converge at the airport, where delays turn shared dependence on limited flights into an immediate struggle over mobility. When stranded passengers shout, “We want to go home,” Kinmen residents rely on those same flights for medical care, work and family life. Both groups’ mobility needs are compressed into the same fragile infrastructure. Waiting times and travel risks subsequently spread along different temporal and social pathways: visitors confront an acute interruption to an onward journey, while residents encounter a recurring vulnerability within everyday island life.
Understanding Kinmen as a breathing infrastructure therefore allows us to move from rising passenger traffic towards the local costs of connectivity. Differences in the cost of movement turn Kinmen into infrastructure, placing the island in the service of cross-border travel between Taiwan and China. Variable maritime weather continually subjects this infrastructure to intake, blockage and delay. Passenger volumes can expand quickly. The island’s capacity to retain economic value, protect residents’ travel and release passengers through its sea-air system adjusts at a slower pace. Kinmen residents’ livelihood predicament consequently binds together income retention, inter-island movement, the costs of waiting and local rights to transport.
Kinmen’s experience thus raises a wider question: when an island takes on the role of infrastructure for cross-border mobility, how can it preserve the breathing space required for life on its island?
Chengyu Yang is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Bristol. His research explores how Kinmen’s inhabitants make a living and envision their futures amid the changing infrastructural politics of this archipelagic borderland by focusing on the unbuilt Kinmen-Xiamen Bay Bridge and Kinmen’s disappearing oyster farms. Chengyu also has broader interests in the social lives of intertidal zones, border(ing), infrastructures and logistics studies.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Maritime Borders and Fisheries in Taiwan.