XIAMEN, June 21 (Xinhua) - As night fell, Chen Feifei woke up in her tiny room inside a fortress perched on the rocks facing the Taiwan Strait. With a handgun tucked in her pocket, she walked out, cranked a heavy hand-generator and removed the cloth covering a giant loud-speaker.
"Brothers of the Chiang Kai-shek army ..." she would start speaking through the microphone in her fortress studio.
Chen, now 75, said that was how she started her daily routine as an announcer six decades ago at one of four frontline broadcasting stations on the coast of southeast China's Xiamen city -- the nearest mainland port to Taiwan.
Her audience were soldiers and followers of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Taiwan after losing the civil war to the Communist Party of China in 1949.
From Taiwan, Chiang's defeated army started a decades-old military stand-off with the mainland. Through the 1950s and 1960s, shells flew across the Taiwan Strait from time to time.
As part of psychological warfare, the mainland and Taiwan set up loud-speakers on the coasts of Xiamen and Kinmen respectively from 1953 -- blaring hostile rhetoric depicting "appalling" living conditions on the other side.
Fluent in Fokkien, the dialect widely spoken in both southeastern Fujian and Taiwan, Chen was transferred from the military's arts troupe to churn out such rhetoric.
"Mostly I urged Chiang's soldiers to defect," Chen told Xinhua. "I would sometimes read letters from their left-behind relatives."
"And I would announce cash incentives for those who yielded weapons - for example a handgun for 50 yuan and a machine gun for 150 yuan," she added. |
