I'm starting to believe that China isn't going to make the move. It's winning the hearts and minds of the rest of the world and will be able to leverage its growing soft power well beyond what Taiwan would provide. I just don't see them giving up the position the US has abandoned.

I'm starting to think so as well. The Chinese are typically cautious geopolitically, and very strategic. They may well have made the calculus that for the foreseeable future, they have more to gain from keeping the status quo re Taiwan while their rivals score own goals, waiting for a possible rapprochement with Taiwan on favorable terms.

That's something the factions in the Middle East miss: sometimes great change comes from patiently applying pressure and infiltrating from within, rather than a frontal attack.

China's better move rn would be to go for the big soft power play and ditch the Russians for the abandoned Europeans.

I suspect that they are willing to wait a few more years until they have built up their own chip making capacity so that disrupting Formosa won’t strongly affect their own economy, while it will hinder other developed countries.