Beijing's coast guard has moved from intermittent Scarborough Shoal sweeps to near-daily presence through June, and the number that matters here is not the patrol count but the admiral's, three to five years, the capability gap Lee Hsi-min gave Semafor for Beijing's amphibious lift and logistics base. The PBOC does not read that gap as a ceiling on pressure. It reads it, or more precisely the State Administration of Foreign Exchange's reserve-adequacy desk reads it, as a financing question: a multi-year coercion campaign against Taiwan's shipping insurers, port operators and cross-strait clearing corridors has to be funded out of somewhere, and the Scarborough cadence is the pilot program SAFE's own risk modelers can price before the Taiwan Strait version goes live. That is the ledger Xi's Taiwan Affairs Office is building against, not a strait crossing.

Taipei's Legislative Yuan takes up the KMT's drone procurement bill in committee the week of July 6, and the number the HKMA's balance-of-payments desk will be watching sits underneath it: whether the bill's financing runs through NT dollar bond issuance that widens Taiwan's external funding gap in a way Hong Kong-domiciled underwriters have to reprice, or through reallocated budget lines that leave the sovereign credit picture unchanged. President Lai's cadet speech named the tools as patience and proximity. The PBOC's counter-tool is cheaper and slower still, a multi-year drag on the insurance and financing costs of doing business in the Strait, and it does not need a committee vote to keep accruing.