The People's Liberation Army is preparing contingency plans for a full blockade of Taiwan, according to reporting this week that moves beyond the "quarantine" exercises Beijing ran in 2025. A blockade is not a quarantine with a bigger perimeter. A quarantine inspects; a blockade denies passage entirely, and the legal distinction matters because Beijing has spent three years building the operational muscle for the latter while briefing the former to foreign correspondents. The same week, the PLA ran live-missile patrols over a disputed shoal, a rehearsal detail that reads less like signaling and more like inventory management. President Lai Ching-te's cabinet responded on its own calendar: a proposed NT$1 trillion defense budget for 2027, the first time Taipei's annual defense line has crossed that threshold, up from the record NT$1.12 trillion already passed for 2026.

The number that should worry a strategy desk is not the budget. It is the sequencing. Xi Jinping has removed 46 officers from PLA leadership positions this year, a purge wide enough to strip his Central Military Commission down to two members ahead of his own 2027 deadline for combat readiness, the same year Taipei's new budget targets. A commander does not usually accelerate blockade planning while gutting the officer corps meant to execute it, unless the purge and the planning are running on separate tracks: one for loyalty, one for capability, both converging on 2027. If Beijing's blockade contingency moves from planning document to exercise rotation before Taipei's NT$1 trillion budget clears the legislature, the next Taiwan Strait crisis will be dated to a defense appropriations calendar, not a diplomatic one.