Relational geography of a border island: local development and compensatory destruction on Lieyu, Taiwan Su-Hsin Lee National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan shlee@ntnu.edu.tw Wen-Hua Huang National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan ecohook@gmail.com and Adam Grydehøj Island Dynamics, Denmark Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada agrydehoj@islanddynamics.org ABSTRACT: The paper considers Lieyu island from a relational geography perspective, relative to the islands of Kinmen, Xiamen, and Taiwan. Lieyu retains its natural landscape and military heritage in part due to its remote location and military restrictions relative to nearby Kinmen Island. Local politicians harness Lieyu’s archipelagic relationality and sense of underdevelopment relative to other islands in its archipelago to gain financial subsidies for infrastructure development. Such infrastructure projects (including fixed links) endanger Lieyu’s sense of islandness and island place. We introduce the term ‘compensatory destruction’, which involves destroying existing place-based values or attributes in the process of implementing new values in the name of development. Although compensatory destruction is not necessarily bad, care must be taken to ensure that development projects serve the needs of the community as a whole and are adequately assessed and evaluated. Keywords: compensatory destruction, islands, Kinmen, local development, relational geography, Taiwan, Xiamen https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.33 © 2017 — Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Introduction This paper analyses how archipelagic relationality affects place identity and infrastructural development on Lieyu, a small island in Taiwan’s Kinmen Archipelago. We argue that Lieyu’s political, economic, and social relationships at different island scales (with the large adjacent Kinmen Island, with the main island of Taiwan, and with the nearby mainland Chinese island city of Xiamen) produce a sense of underdevelopment and spur efforts to overcome relative inequality. This results in processes of compensatory destruction, in which existing place-based values are replaced in the pursuit of development. Island Studies Journal, ahead of print