China's Economic, Social, and Military Calculus for Annexing Taiwan by 2030

China will keep pressing the First Island Chain with gray-zone coercion short of war, on a unification timeline set less by military readiness than by Xi's own actuarial one.

The assessment is written in estimative language throughout — very likely, almost certain, likely — and it commits to a window: unification pursued by 2030, but no earlier than 2026. The reasoning behind that floor is the interesting part. It reads the timeline off leadership rather than capability, arguing that the driver is Xi's legacy campaign and the span he can personally expect, which is a claim about motive that a purely order-of-battle assessment would miss.