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Taiwan just elected a government whose policies were to go for closer relations with China and to not go for membership of the UN. Trying to invade Taiwan at this stage is a good way of rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory.

Even planning for that eventuality is counter productive because it could scare Taiwan into spending some of her not inconsiderable reserves of foreign currency on her own defence

That is just democracy in action. I imagine that there have been robust debates since the civil war in the USA, if not in Federal legislatures then in state ones. I know that there have been in Australia in state parliaments.

The boys who have won the "fight" are the ones who for many years wanted to reunite the two Chinas, the Kuomintang.

The Taiwamese are supposed to have limited their investments in the PRC to a hundred bllion [which is simply not true]. The current government had as one of its policies the removal of at least some of the investment limits. Having hundreds of billions invested in the PRC and many of their children working in businesses based in the PRC, I think that Taiwan is well on the way to integration.

Taiwan could have afforded twenty billion for the submarines that they supposedly wanted and built them themselves with plans that found their way into their possession. They have a pretty advanced military but their hearts are not in it the way they were thirty years ago.

The doctrine is that the invasion by the PRC has to be defeated before it lands on Taiwan or the Taiwanese are defeated. That would seem pretty silly when the more troops that the PRC get ashore the more difficult the logistics become for the PRC. If the PRC get an invasion force ashore and they do not control the air or sea, then the invasion force is lost and you would think that would be somewhat desirable but no. The Taiwanese thinking works exactly the opposite. If the PRC get troops ashore, the Army cannot rely on Taiwanese not surrendering.

So if the PRC launch an invasion as a sneak attack, they could find that the Defence forces of Taiwan wipe them out of the sea and air before ordinary citizens know that it is on.

The clever ploy that the PRC came up with was to pound the Taiwanese with missiles and they would surrender rather than lose all their business assets and all the PRC has risked is US retaliation, but they have done that before. The risk to this approach is that the Taiwanese far from surrendering will harden their hearts and round two of the civil war will begin.

So unless politics demand some general make a name for them self and has a go, the PRC will wait for the inevitable. After all, politicians who are willing to punch it out on the floor of the legislature certainly have some sort of fighting spirit.