Beijing's response to the trilateral South China Sea rejection was a shrug. Its response to what Yahoo's satellite imagery shows in the northwest, ranges built to the footprint of the Presidential Office Building and full-scale US destroyer mockups, was to keep building. The two events sit on different desks. Mei Chen has taken the range imagery on its own terms, tempo, training cadence, the Pentagon's next Strait transit. The number that does not appear in that read is the one the People's Bank of China's foreign exchange committee already has open on its screen: Governor Pan Gongsheng's reserve managers price war-risk premia into the same weekly hedging cycle that absorbs Iran's Hormuz numbers, and a range built to a specific building's dimensions is a capital expenditure, carried on a PLA procurement ledger the State Council's own budget office signs off against, not a message routed through Guam.

The distinction that matters to Premier Li's economic working group is which of these line items shows up as a rounding error against Iran's transmission into dollar-funding costs, and which one requires a supplemental appropriation. The Hormuz numbers move through PBOC's weekly reserve cycle whether or not Washington is watching Taipei this month; the range and the destroyer mockups sit on a multi-year PLA capital account that gets reviewed at the Central Military Commission's budget session, not reset by news cycle. Or, more precisely, the mockups are the kind of spend that shows up once, in one line, at the annual defense budget disclosure due in March 2027, while Hormuz-linked reserve costs reprice every Friday. Premier Li's desk watches the Friday number. The March disclosure is where the Fujian range gets its bill.