1. Taiwan is a territory in China's neighbourhood. Taiwan is about 2000 km from China and 12000 km from the US. Fuel costs money and it's more expensive for the nations defunding Taiwan to send the cruisers and carriers on patrol than it is for China to send its ships into the waters.

2. Reclamation of Taiwan is one of the core tenets of modern day Chinese ambitions- Xi Jinping in an announcement a few years back declared a date earlier than 2030 for when Taiwan will be United with China which shows that it is a core ideal pursued by the CCP.

3. The people consider Taiwan China's territory. Reclaiming Taiwan is a matter of national pride and the people believe that they are meant to have Taiwan as a part of China. The support for Taiwan takeover is not just at the party level but throughout their society.

4. The primary reason for Taiwanese protection is its chip manufacturing. Taiwan has state of the art chip manufacturing facilities and produces some of the smallest nanometer standard semiconductor chips in the world and is one of the largest suppliers of high level chips to the world. This is what makes Taiwan especially geopolitically relevant to the US and the West. Taiwan is currently able to implement a 5nm standard, someone can correct me but if I am not being domestic production within the US itself is currently at 7nm processes. With China entering full scale production for 14 nm semiconductors only this year. Which puts China at least five years behind the peak in semiconductor technology even at the fastest rates of research, but far more likely one to one and a half decades behind the cutting edge. If the US is able to shift chip manufacturing at the cutting edge back to the US then it would no longer be reliant on Taiwan and would not have as much of a reason to defend them, but this situation is unlikely to arrive for at least another decade.

The most important points in my opinion are 3 and 4 together. Taiwan only exists as a country today because it is of high value to the west in terms of keeping the lights and manufacturing on at the cutting edge. The day that advantage disappears it is likely that soon the protections provided would disappear.

So my final prediction is that Taiwan is reunited with China because China considers it a national policy and national pride issue to take back Taiwan, but it happens by 2040-2050 because of the reason that Taiwan goes out of it's way to be at the cutting edge to retain value as an independent territory.

Thank you for reading this far and I would love to hear your opinion on the matter.