In major military exercise, China simulates sealing off Taiwan’s ports
China employed a record 125 aircraft, as well as its Liaoning aircraft carrier and ships, in large-scale military exercises surrounding Taiwan and its outlying islands Monday, simulating the sealing off of key ports in a move that underscores the tense situation in the Taiwan Strait, officials said.
China’s Defence Ministry said the drills were a response to the Taiwanese president’s refusal to accept Beijing’s demand that self-governed Taiwan acknowledge itself as a part of the People’s Republic of China under the rule of the Communist Party.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence said 90 of the aircraft, including warplanes, helicopters and drones, were spotted within Taiwan’s air defence identification zone. The single-day record counted aircraft from 5:02 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. local time. Shipping traffic was operating as normal, the ministry said.
The drills came four days after Taiwan celebrated the founding of its government on its National Day, when Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said in a speech that China has no right to represent Taiwan and declared his commitment to “resist annexation or encroachment.”
“Our military will definitely deal with the threat from China appropriately,” Joseph Wu, secretary general of Taiwan’s security council, said at a forum in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. “Threatening other countries with force violates the basic spirit of the United Nations Charter to resolve disputes through peaceful means.”
‘Stop threatening Taiwan’s democracy’
Taiwan’s Presidential Office called on China to “cease military provocations that undermine regional peace and stability and stop threatening Taiwan’s democracy and freedom.”
A map aired on China’s state broadcaster CCTV showed six large blocks encircling Taiwan indicating where the military drills were being held, along with circles drawn around Taiwan’s outlying islands.
Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said the six areas focused on key strategic locations around and on the island.
China deployed its Liaoning aircraft carrier for the drills, and CCTV showed a J-15 fighter jet taking off from the deck of the carrier, though the exact location of the ship is unclear.
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China’s People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theatre Command spokesperson Senior Captain Li Xi said the navy, army air force and missile corps were all mobilized for the drills, which were an integrated operation.
“This is a major warning to those who back Taiwan independence and a signifier of our determination to safeguard our national sovereignty,” Li said in a statement on the service’s public media channel.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing that China did not consider relations with Taiwan a diplomatic issue, in keeping with its refusal to recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state.
“I can tell you that Taiwan independence is as incompatible with peace in the Taiwan Strait as fire with water. Provocation by the Taiwan independence forces will surely be met with countermeasures,” Mao said.
‘I am used to it’
Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said it deployed warships to designated spots in the ocean to carry out surveillance and stand at ready. It also deployed mobile missile and radar groups on land to track the vessels at sea. It said as of Monday morning, they had tracked 25 Chinese warplanes and seven warships and four Chinese government ships, though it did not specify what types of ships they were.
On the streets of Taipei, residents were undeterred. “I don’t worry, I don’t panic either, it doesn’t have any impact to me,” Chang Chia-rui said.
Another Taipei resident, Jeff Huang, said: “Taiwan is very stable now, and I am used to China’s military exercises. I have been threatened by this kind of threats since I was a child, and I am used to it.”
The U.S., Taiwan’s biggest unofficial ally, called China’s response to Lai’s speech unwarranted. “We call on [Beijing’s government] to act with restraint and to avoid any further actions that may undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the broader region,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement.
China held similar large-scale exercises after Lai was inaugurated in May. Lai continues the eight-year rule of the Democratic Progressive Party that rejects China’s demand that it recognize Taiwan is a part of China.
Also on Monday, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office announced it was sanctioning two Taiwanese individuals, Puma Shen and Robert Tsao, for promoting Taiwanese independence. Shen is the co-founder of the Kuma Academy, a nonprofit group that trains civilians on wartime readiness. Tsao donated $32.8 million US to fund the academy’s training courses. Shen and Tsao are forbidden to travel to China, including Hong Kong.
China also held massive military exercises around Taiwan and simulated a blockade in 2022 after a visit to the island by Nancy Pelosi, who was then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. China routinely states that Taiwan independence is a “dead end” and that annexation by Beijing is a historical inevitability. China’s military has increased its encircling of Taiwan’s skies and waters in the past few years, holding joint drills with its warships and fighter jets on a near-daily basis near the island.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony before being unified with China at the end of the Second World War. It split away in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to the island as Mao Zedong’s Communists defeated them in a civil war and took power.
Published at Mon, 14 Oct 2024 10:21:22 +0000
Lilly Ledbetter, icon in the battle for U.S. equal pay, dead at 86
Lilly Ledbetter, an former Alabama factory manager whose lawsuit against her employer made her an icon of the equal pay movement and led to landmark wage discrimination legislation, has died at 86.
Ledbetter’s discovery that she was earning less than her male counterparts for doing the same job at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Alabama led to her lawsuit, which ultimately failed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that she had filed her complaint too late.
The court ruled that workers must file lawsuits within six months of first receiving a discriminatory paycheck – in Ledbetter’s case, years before she learned about the disparity through an anonymous letter.
Two years later, former U.S. president Barack Obama signed into the law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gave workers the right to sue within 180 days of receiving each discrimination paycheck, not just the first one.
“Lilly Ledbetter never set out to be a trailblazer or a household name. She just wanted to be paid the same as a man for her hard work,” Obama said in a statement Monday.
“Lilly did what so many Americans before her have done: setting her sights high for herself and even higher for her children and grandchildren.”
Ledbetter died Saturday of respiratory failure, according to a statement from her family cited by the Alabama news site AL.com.
Ledbetter continued campaigning for equal pay for decades after winning the law named after her. A film about her life starring Patricia Clarkson premiered last week at the Hamptons International Film Festival.
Enduring legacy
In January, U.S. President Joe Biden marked the 15th anniversary of the law named after Ledbetter with new measures to help close the gender wage gap, including a new rule barring the federal government from considering a person’s current or past pay when determining their salary.
Ledbetter and other advocates for years have been frustrated that more comprehensive initiatives have stalled, including the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
The sense of urgency among advocates deepened after an annual report from the U.S. Census Bureau last month found that the gender wage gap between men and women widened for the first time 20 years.
In 2023, women working full time in the U.S. earned 83 cents on the dollar compared with men, down from 84 cents in 2022.
Even before then, advocates had been frustrated that wage gap improvement had mostly stalled for the last 20 years despite women making gains in the C-suite and earning college degrees at a faster rate than men.
Pay gap continues
Experts say the reasons for the enduring gap are multifaceted, including the overrepresentation of women in lower-paying industries and weak childcare system that pushes many women to step back from their careers in their peak earnings years.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Ledbetter wrote a opinion piece in The New York Times detailing the harassment she faced as a manager at the Goodyear factory and drawing a link between workplace sexual harassment and pay discrimination.
“She was indefatigable,” said Emily Martin, chief program officer at the National Women’s Law Center, which worked closely with Ledbetter.
“She was always ready to lend her voice, to show up to do a video, to write an op-ed. She was always ready to go.”
Ledbetter was a manager at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Alabama, and had worked there 19 years when she received an anonymous note saying she was being paid significantly less than three male colleagues.
She filed a lawsuit in 1999 and initially won $3.8 million US in backpay and damages from a federal court. She never received the money after eventually losing her case before the Supreme Court.
Although the law named after her didn’t directly address the gender wage gap, Martin said it set an important precedent “for ensuring that we don’t just have the promise of equal pay on the books but we have a way to enforce the law.”
“She is a really an inspiration in showing us how a loss does not mean you can’t win,” Martin said. “We know her name because she lost, and she lost big, and she kept coming back from it and kept working until the day she died to change that loss into real gains for women across the country.”
Published at Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:42:28 +0000