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I was wrong about Russia invading Ukraine so discount accordingly, but I think the odds of China invading Taiwan are very low in the short term.
First we have to ask whether China even wants Taiwan. Sabre-rattling about Taiwan serves as a reliable way to stir up nationalistic feelings in the people. This is useful when the dear leader starts to lose the favor of heaven. Taiwan as a rebellious province has more use to the regime than as a subdued enemy. In other words, would China capturing Taiwan be like the dog that catches the car?
But let's say that China does want Taiwan. I think in the near term, the logistics of an amphibious landing are impossible. China's military has essentially no actual combat experience (unless we count fighting Indian soldiers with melee weapons on remote Himalayan passes). While we are in the early stages of a revolution in military technology, I think the U.S. carriers groups and air superiority fighters would still win the day.
In the long term, I am much more bullish on China's chances. Demographics are a headwind, but China will still have 3 times the population of the U.S. in twenty years. Furthermore, the world's reliance on Chinese trade grows stronger every year. China is eating the world. They dominate most industries and are on a path to domination of the rest. China's spending on military equipment is remarkable, and their ability to create more grows while the abilities of the West fade. The West's existing stock of legacy material (F-35s and carrier groups) will matter less in the future.
So China can just sit back and let its advantages compound. When they have naval superiority and a more secure supply chain of natural resources they will strike. And when they do take Taiwan it may be without even firing a shot.
The interesting thing about Taiwan are the state-of-the-art TSMC chip fabs, which are better than what the PRC has.
However, these are fragile things easily destroyed in the event of an invasion, and keeping them running without support from ASML would likely be hard to impossible.
And while Taiwan is important, it is not the only place in which the US could manufacture state of the art chips for military use, so taking Taiwan would hurt the US economically but not cripple it militarily.
Of course, Taiwan might also be a Schelling spot for anti-Communist Chinese, like Hong-Kong was before. But risking World War 3 to drive your ideological opponents from Taipei to San Francisco seems rather pointless -- especially if you can also just impose Honecker-style controls on your people so they can not defect.
Taiwan is also important as an airbase and submarine base for China, as territory that needs to be denied to the US bloc. If they want to do anything more in the Pacific they need that territory free of enemy forces, radar, missiles... If they have Taiwan, then they also control trade routes and energy imports from the Middle East to Japan and South Korea.
There's also a political aspect to it, they wanted the island well before semiconductors to properly conclude the Chinese Civil War. Plus the pool of human capital that manages the semiconductor production is also quite valuable, Operation Paperclipping them would be helpful for Chinese semiconductor efforts.
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It will be interesting to see who wins the next chip race: China or the United States. It's a critical priority for both countries. The U.S. effort is not going well, with Intel floundering and TSMC having trouble with its American workforce.
Nevertheless, China seems to be far behind the U.S. According to Wikipedia, they currently make nothing smaller than 16 nm.
Critically, the chip race isn't between China and the US. It is between China and the US-Netherlands (ASML)-Germany (Zeiss)-UK (ARM)-Taiwan coalition.
If the West allows China to defeat us in detail, China will probably succeed. But that would be a very stupid thing to do.
Without the export bans China would have continued to buy instead of build the most advanced process chips for the foreseeable future. We've forced their hand to bet everything on build.
I don't disagree with you - I was just pointing out that we have to careful about who "we" is in this context.
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