TAIPEI: Taiwan’s defense ministry said 37 Chinese aircraft were detected around the self-ruled island Wednesday as they headed to exercises with an aircraft carrier in the western Pacific.
China claims democratic Taiwan as part of its territory and maintains a near-daily presence of fighter jets, drones and warships around the island, which is located 180 kilometers (110 miles) from the southern Chinese coast.
It is also a crucial part of a chain of islands that military strategists say serve as a gateway from the South China Sea — which China claims in nearly its entirety — to the Pacific Ocean.
At around 9:30 am (0130 GMT) Wednesday, Taipei said that “since 0520 today, the Ministry of National Defense detected a total of 37 Chinese aircraft” around Taiwan, including fighter jets, bombers and drones.
Thirty-six of the aircraft crossed the sensitive median line of the Taiwan Strait — which bisects the narrow waterway separating the island from China.
“(The aircraft) headed to the Western Pacific via our southern and southeastern airspace to cooperate with the aircraft carrier the Shandong in conducting ‘joint sea and air training’,” the defense ministry said in a statement.
Defense Minister Wellington Koo told reporters the Shandong “did not pass through the Bashi Channel,” the area off Taiwan’s southern tip where Chinese ships typically transit en route to the Pacific Ocean.
Instead, it “went further south through the Balingtang Channel toward the Western Pacific,” he said, referring to a waterway just north of the Philippines’ Babuyan Island — about 250 kilometers south of Bashi.
The Chinese flights come a day after Japan’s Joint Staff Office said four PLA navy vessels — including the Shandong — were sailing 520 kilometers southeast of Miyako Island.
“On the same day, the Chinese navy’s Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier ‘Shandong’ was observed landing and departing fighter aircraft and helicopters on board,” it said in a statement.
China has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control and has ramped up military and political pressures on the island in recent years.
In May, days after Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te took office, China launched war games around the island as “punishment” for an inauguration speech that Beijing called a “confession of Taiwan independence.”
On Wednesday, Lai met with Raymond Greene, new director of the American Institute in Taiwan — the de-facto US embassy, emphasising their “solid partnership... in the midst of China’s repeated provocation and attempts to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”
While the United States, like many other countries, does not officially recognize Taiwan diplomatically, it is Taipei’s key partner and major provider of weapons — a point of consternation for Beijing which has repeatedly called on Washington to stop arming the island.
Greene said Wednesday that Washington would continue to “strongly support Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.”
“We have a long-term and shared interest to maintain the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. This is vital to the prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region, as well as to global security,” he said during his meeting with Lai.
37 Chinese aircraft skirt Taiwan on way to drill: Taipei
https://arab.news/6mvvw
37 Chinese aircraft skirt Taiwan on way to drill: Taipei
- China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and maintains a near-daily presence of fighter jets, drones and warships around the island
- The Chinese flights come a day after Japan said four PLA navy vessels were sailing 520 kilometers southeast of Miyako Island
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
