Defence Minister Dong Jun told the Xiangshan Forum this week that nations should avoid provocative actions over Taiwan, a line that landed the same week Beijing threatened to cancel Xi's September 24 White House visit unless Washington drops a $14 billion Taiwan arms sale. The People's Liberation Army does not set that cancellation threshold. The Ministry of Commerce and the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office do, and Dong's restraint at a defence forum is the military clearing its throat before the trade and diplomatic desks do the actual negotiating in the nine days before the summit date.

The PBOC's open-market desk reads the sequencing plainly enough: a defence minister counsels calm in public while the arms-sale dispute stays live in private, because a cancelled summit would land on the same foreign-exchange desk that has spent the year defending the yuan's band against capital outflow pressure, not on the Xiangshan Forum's guest list. Dong's Beijing did not offer this restraint out of goodwill. It offered it because the People's Bank needs a resolved trade calendar before its November policy fixing, and a summit collapse over Taiwan arms would hand the foreign-exchange desk a currency shock it has not budgeted for. The PBOC has until September 24 to see whether the arms sale gets shelved or the summit gets cancelled instead.