Highly recommend the economist’s podcast on Xi called ‘The Prince’ Xi became a Leninist and is trying to be the next Mao. He is a true believer that his glory and the glory of China can only happen by taking back Taiwan. TSMC is a huge reason for this conflict. The current US policy is trying to slow China’s technological might for that next war.
I worked for a defense contractor back in the early 2000s when the USG was selling a lot of arms and systems to Taiwan. I got to see the bullying in person via the ASOC (part of the C4ISR platform) system we were installing. China would routinely fly fighters over the straight to the boundary and fly the line and return to the mainland. I didn't understand the rationale at the time but the US was enabling Taiwan for their own interests in chips. China doesn't matter as much but Taiwan does. The US always had a large naval presence in Taiwan that I saw. China has a relatively weak naval force in comparison - but obviously enough forces to easily take over Taiwan if and when they really feel the need to. I think these programs just bought the US more time.
Ultimately though, China needs Taiwan for those chips. The problem being that if the major producers leave Taiwan then China is hopeless as they don't possess the capabilities or people to retool. They need the likes of Germany and others to even think about the ability to produce competitive processors to AMD / Intel. China can't build its own fab for these types of procs.
Finally, I didn't realize until more recently that China was, and still is, relatively incapable on their own. Some recent books put it into perspective for me on a global scale. But the fact that China just recently figured out how to manufacture a high precision pen is an interesting reference [0].
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...