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My read is that China will take Taiwan, and they'll do it very similarly to the way they did Hong Kong, and almost certainly not in the next twelve months.
The Taiwanese consider themselves chinese, large sections of their population already support union with China, the Taiwanese military is ridiculous and corrupt. In time politics, soft power, economics and possible chinese control of the south pacific will give China a beachhead in Taiwan without invasion. Say what you will about the Chicoms, they plan for the future.
My guess is the only thing that would trigger an invasion is a tottering Communist Party which needs a popular war to stay in the saddle.
Polls say otherwise, and my own interactions are consistent with those numbers. Even many Taiwanese boomers who grew up under KMT martial law are, if not anti-unification in the abstract, becoming as rabidly anti-Xi as their grandchildren due to a combination of his own hawkish rhetoric, what they hear from mainlanders fleeing COVID lockdowns and the increasingly harsh censorship regime, and the collapse of the Chinese housing bubble. That's not to say that China couldn't crush popular dissent with overwhelming force as they did in Hong Kong, but most collaborators would have to be bought rather than joining willingly.
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That plan was going quite well until they altered the deal on Hong Kong. When they did, Taiwanese support for unification crashed to lizardman and has remained there since.
Indeed, things change. Reunification cannot happen peacefully in the present circumstance. But maybe in another 50 years things will have changed again.
Say what you like about what the CCP did to Hong Kong (and believe me, I do), but it demonstrated their ability and patience to execute a multi-decade plan.
Mainland China (and Taiwan for that matter) is going to be an extremely different place in 50 years. The demographic graying the mainland is going to go through is going to hit their economy like a flood of molasses and the 2070s are going to be exactly when they're in the thick of it.
The PRC essentially has until the 2040s to get something off against Taiwan, afterwards they will be struggling against the worst dependency ratio in world history. They have a good window between about now and 2035 when the American naval procurement cycle is at a nadir and they continue to grow competitive on hardware.
If nothing happens by 2035, nothing is likely to happen ever.
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I don't think it was particularly likely to be a multi-decade plan secretly passed down. I think decades ago Chinese leadership wanted at least partial control of Hong Kong as a matter of national pride, but didn't think they could get away with total control. And then more recently they felt they could get away with total control, so they went ahead and enforced more control.
I think it's more like "they did some things they didn't think would cause a furore that did, and then they weren't sure they could maintain control without a full crackdown".
I'm definitely in agreement with you against @AshLael that what happened in Hong Kong does not scream "long-term plan". The "charm offensive" screamed "long-term plan" - you can actually see its effect on Taiwanese attitudes toward unification - and the Darth Vader stunt ruined that plan, so it doesn't make sense for the Darth Vader stunt with that timing to have been a long-term plan (the obvious long-term plan would have been to wait out the 50-year agreement and/or to wait until Taiwan also agreed to 1C2S and had been garrisoned with PLA troops). At the very least, if it was a long-term plan, then the CPC is either completely bananas (yes, yes, they're bad at understanding WEIRD mindset, but "if you break agreement X with person Y, person Z will be less likely to enter agreement X with you" is more general than that) or has a major case of left-hand/right-hand.
Xi in particular seems to have a preoccupation with projecting a certain kind of strength/dominance to the detriment of other concerns, causing him to derail long-term efforts by previous Chinese leaders to sell an image of China as a reasonable and conciliatory actor. I don't know if this got as specific as particular schemes so much as it was a high level strategy that was reflected in how the Chinese government approached various issues.
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