I’m not going to argue with your direct experience on the ground and knowing the culture of Taiwan, but what I’ve seen the DPP is far more popular than KMT (possibly for historical reasons when the Kuomintang ruled as a one-party autocracy), and the Taiwanese I’ve met (an admittedly self-selected people critical of the PRC) are insistent that the Taiwanese will not voluntarily lay down and accept mainland control even though many have a cultural affection for China and have relatives on the mainland. A key issue is what they’ve seen happen to Hong Kong post-1997 transfer; the Taiwanese struggled for democratic reforms and they have to know (despite PRC propaganda efforts) that being subsumed by the mainland government would be an end to that.
I agree that Taiwan let military readiness fall into a poor state in the late-‘Nineties and beginning of the 2000s because the rhetoric about PRC ‘reunification’ became just kind of a background noise but what I’ve seen of readiness estimates in the last ten years shows substantial improvement. They’re not prepared to take on the whole of the PLA, for sure, but then, there isn’t any way that the PLA can actually bring their collective might to Taiwan in one massive, sudden attack, either.
For that matter, the PLA hasn’t actually been tested in a real war since the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War and subsequent minor conflicts; ever since then they’ve had a few border skirmishes and naval conflicts against Vietnamese and Filipino fishing fleets and coastal defense, but nothing like a serious conflict between a near-peer adversary. They haven’t engaged in any kind of contested amphibious landing since taking Hainan in 1950, and if history has taught us anything it is that even the best trained military can seriously fuck up an amphibious assault through the lack of understanding the hazards and difficulties. This just seems like an effort so costly and prone to failure as to be absurd…but as I said, I’m not longer evaluating the likelihood of Xi doing this based upon rational estimates.
Chairman Xi is a 71 year old man, to be sure, but even more crucial is the ability to sustain whatever state of readiness that the PRC has managed to build PLAN and PLAAF up to in the past decade. China is facing severe demographic collapse, and while they are not as dependent upon the domestic consumer market as most developed nations are, they are already experiencing dramatic contraction which will only worsen with deglobalization (and this invasion would accelerate that trend). A lot of analysts are really focused on China’s energy needs and how that limits growth but without workers, consumers, and investors, the country basically has no economy to sustain a military capable of engaging in this kind of adventure.
I’m not as pessimistic on China’s future as some doomsayers who are arguing that it won’t exist in ten or twenty years but it just isn’t going to have the means to project power (insofar as it can now), and the economic ‘soft power’ of the Belt & Road initiative is dependent upon globalized trade, so even if they reclaim facilities that they’ve bankrolled other nations to build for them like the shittiest international payday lender it won’t do them much good if nobody is actually buying the Chinese products that they aren’t making because their labor base as shrunk to a fraction of what they need while the elderly population inexorably mushrooms outward. For all that Xi has essentially shut down people feeding him any bad news he cannot be so obtuse as to not realize this (even if he is reading the ‘official’ figures that show the PRC at only about half of population replacement rate instead of the more realistic estimate of a quarter or less of replacement). This decade is China’s moment, and for Xi to establish his legacy he has to act as soon as he can gain the advantage, not wait for economics and the aging population to cut through China’s ability to engage in such an extravagant adventure.
That’s just my take; I may be all wet (and nodding to @TokyoBayer, may well be wrong on my estimation of Taiwanese resistance) but I’ve been looking at China for about the last twenty years, first because of their space ambitions and increasing awareness of their extensive global espionage system, but then at their more aggressive military posturing and use of Belt & Road to gain strategic advantage in a manner fairly parallel to how the United States created a global trade hegemony post-WWII, and I see China ramping up almost exponentially but without the means to sustain this posture economically in the longer term. Notwithstanding, of course, what climate change (which China is well aware of but almost completely unprepared to deal with) will do to impact their economy and military capabilities.
Stranger