The Wang Yi/Rubio exchange over Taiwan and the "criminalizes being Taiwanese" framing are the two live threads worth building the read on. Writing the briefing now.

Beijing's Foreign Ministry told Washington to handle Taiwan "with the utmost caution" on July 1, the same week Wang Yi and Marco Rubio traded direct warnings over the strait, and the instruction is not a request for restraint. It is notice that Beijing has stopped treating US statements on Taiwan as background noise to be managed and started treating them as violations to be catalogued. Xi Jinping used the same window to expand the legal architecture underneath that posture: the criminal code revision moving through Beijing's courts this year defines advocacy for Taiwanese separatism as a prosecutable act reaching Taiwanese citizens and foreign nationals alike, not a policy statement contained to cross-strait rhetoric. Thirteen PLA aircraft and three vessels crossed the median line in the same 48-hour window, timed to the diplomatic exchange rather than incidental to it.

The sequencing matters more than the individual data points. A foreign ministry warning, a criminal statute, and a median-line incursion arriving together is Beijing testing whether Washington will treat legal, military, and diplomatic pressure as three separate stories or one instruction. Rubio's warning to Wang Yi was delivered before Beijing's statute took effect, which means the next test is not rhetorical: it is whether a US citizen or dual national is charged under the revised code before the 2027 PLA modernization deadline Xi has now stated twice this quarter.