The question of Taiwan will, I think, boil down to a matter of regime survival.
If—and this will never happen—Xi Jinping were just to announce “Okay, we're giving up on Taiwan. We're not going to use coercion at all. We're just going to woo Taiwan into coming over and joining with us,” there would be widespread public disagreement and anger. I think that even a division or more of the PLA could get involved.
The second red generation that is Xi Jinping's main pillar of support largely runs the PLA today. The PLA doesn't interfere with politics, but if it came to something like this, I think that the PLA might get involved. Xi Jinping knows this. Giving up on Taiwan would be tantamount to recognizing the possibility of regime overthrow, and when that is a possibility, the regime is capable of doing anything.
That's the message of 1989 with the Tiananmen massacre. Deng Xiaoping said in a key meeting with the core group of the politburo that they would pay any price and endure any hardship to keep their political power.
Taiwan is a core interest, and it's a core matter for the survivability of the regime. I think, quite frankly, there is not a whole lot that we could do militarily. We can make it very clear that there will be an enormous cost, that China will be outcast internationally and that it will face massive world boycotts, but in the end, the CCP won't care.