Xi arrives in Washington this week carrying two ledgers that do not reconcile on the same clock. The first is the Taiwan file: the Politburo Standing Committee's version of a halt to US weapons transfers, the one Xi can present at home without conceding anything Beijing has not already conceded in private channels since the two senior military officials were expelled from the Communist Party on September 22, days before this trip was set. The second ledger sits with the People's Bank of China's open-market desk, which is still absorbing the fallout from a 360 billion yuan bank and insurer rescue that the finance ministry funded in part through the state tobacco monopoly earlier this month, a financing choice that told bondholders the ministry's ordinary fiscal channels were already stretched before any tariff resolution reached the table.

The State Department reads the Taiwan framework as the deliverable; the PBOC's desk reads it as a precondition. Premier Li's economic working group has signaled since March, through the liquidity tools the foreign currency desk uses and the press generally does not track, that further easing waits on a tariff outcome the diplomatic track has not yet delivered, or, to put it differently, the summit's trade language matters to the open-market desk only insofar as it changes the collateral the PBOC is willing to accept against that 360 billion yuan exposure. Xi can walk out of Washington with a Taiwan headline that satisfies the Standing Committee. The PBOC's desk needs the same summit to produce a tariff line specific enough to act on before its November fixing, and a headline is not a fixing.