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I think the odds of another Taiwan Strait Crisis are reasonably high, but that China isn't ready to pull the trigger on the big one. In the past I suspected they might move on the outlying islands as a trial run for a blockade or invasion, but having seen what happened when Russia took Crimea without a fight but then waited 8 years to invade for real and gave time for Ukraine to prepare psychologically and materially for war, it seems like that might just light a fire under the bafflingly apathetic Taiwanese population and make their job much harder down the line.
The two key challenges the Chinese military faces in advance of any war are lack of experience and internal corruption. Xi appears to be trying to address the latter, but if he wants to give his army some practice he may intervene in the Burmese Civil War as a fairly low-risk enterprise (who's going to stop them, Thailand?) with a reasonable casus belli (instability and criminal activity on their borders threatening national security). If such an action or any other foreign deployment of Chinese troops were to occur I would start worrying more about future wars.
As to whether China would go for a blockade as opposed to an invasion of Taiwan, it's hard to tell without a better read on the psychology of Xi's inner circle. By blockading they would lose the element of surprise if a shooting war breaks out as a result of a ship being sunk or a plane shot down, including the chance to neutralize US naval and air assets in the Pacific with a first strike. If however they think they can psychologically dominate Taiwan so thoroughly that they would submit without a fight then this would seem to them a low-risk approach, as well as the fact that they can initiate it at any time as opposed to an amphibious crossing which can only happen a few months out of the year.
My wife was telling me about the kidnapping problem there and I remarked that we would probably go to war with a neighbor state whose gangs were holding thousands of Americans as slaves and the government there was doing nothing about it. Apparently if someone makes a scam phone call and speaks native mandarin there's a good chance they're human trafficking victims in a Burmese call center.
China's already erected thousands of kilometers of border fence to mitigate the issue.
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