China

A joint E.Sun Bank and KPMG Taiwan study finds Taiwanese-resident assets booked in Singapore have reached NT$10.4 trillion, surpassing the NT$9.6 trillion still held in Hong Kong — a structural reversal from a decade ago when Hong Kong held over 80 percent of the offshore total. The shift is driven by a documented sequence of PLA military exercises, culminating in December 2025's Justice Mission 2025, combined with Singapore's deliberately engineered pull: tax-exempt family-office vehicles, a post-October 2024 three-month approval track, and Mandarin-speaking private banking teams that have grown fourfold at some Taiwanese banks. Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission is responding with an onshore Asian Asset Management Center targeting NT$4 trillion in new AUM over six years, but the reform pace is slower than the outflow rate, raising the risk that Singapore booking centres become the de facto pricing surface for Taiwanese private wealth.

In June 2026, China's Coast Guard escorted survey ships inside Japan's EEZ, ordered a Japanese research vessel to halt, and broadcast jurisdictional claims to merchant ships in Taiwan's exclusive economic zone — none of which it has legal authority to do under UNCLOS. Beijing is backing these actions with three overlapping domestic statutes and a historical-rights claim the 2016 arbitral tribunal already rejected. Japan and Taiwan are both pushing back through coordinated coast guard operations and formal condemnations, but the pattern shows deliberate normalization: China's vessels were present in the Senkaku contiguous zone 357 of 365 days in 2025, and the June incidents extend that template to new geographic vectors.