WILL CHINA INVADE TAIWAN?

“Even if they lost 100,000 soldiers. They have 200 million more where that came from.”

While that was very much the case in the past and still nominally true now, the PLA has made extensive efforts in recent decades to modernize, streamline, and professionalize their armed forces. An expensive, high tech force takes a certain education level in the recruiting pool to maintain, and a long training cycle to reach proficiency.
Having gone through all the trouble of shedding the mass peasant army doctrine of the past, I cannot help but conclude that they are reluctant to take on too much risk all at once with it. A massive combined arms assault on a heavily populated and defended offshore island is just as complex and risky today as it would have been 80 years ago. Those straights are a huge water gap to overcome and this is no river crossing. The Germans got away with a sneak attack in Norway in 1940, but they had no stomach for doing it for real against the semi-prepared Brits a few months later. Despite having many talented general staff officers, no one knew enough about large scale amphibious operations to inspire much confidence in the outcome.
China has a similar problem. They have not fought a serious war with anybody in quite a while. The last one was the bloody border war with Vietnam in 1979 that did not go too well for them. They fought very well against Western armies in Korea, but that was 70 years ago with that same peasant army. The fighting with India has also been limited border conflict in nature and featured no complex or maritime operations. In short, they have no experience at all in fighting the type of campaign an attack on Taiwan would require, which I think would rival some of the big WW2 landings in scope The high tech ships and planes of today also cannot be easily replaced like the weapons of WW2 could be. That, as much as anything is what worries them. If the attack fails outright or gets bogged down, they risk losing face and being exposed as a paper tiger.
Regardless of how you view the Ukraine situation, it is clear that the Russians have lost far more tanks and trained men then they or anyone else would have guessed back in February. I’m sure China has taken notes and modified some of their risk calculations. I believe the era of large, contested amphibious landings was over decades ago and that China knows this. As the US declines and becomes distracted elsewhere, it may be easy to conclude that China would take the opportunity to go for it. I guess we will see, but I have to think that they will not go before there is a decisive outcome one way or the other in Ukraine.