Three months in, was supposed to take 3 days. What could puti possibly be thinking? China must be watching with baited breath too. Although re-supply for Taiwan will be impossible if they blockade the island.
I think Taiwan is currently safer than it has been for a long time. That's not to say that with Xi Jinping's apparent strategy toward establishing Putinesque control over his country, Taiwan won't be on the menu.
I don't think the Chinese have ever had any illusions about their own relative military backwardness, especially versus the US.
The main thing which I believe they are observing is the law of unintended consequences. Putin wanted to show up NATO and weaken it, counting on national interests preventing any serious united response to his takeover of Ukraine. He seems to have expected cowed Europeans to resist and hinder any effective US response.
And what the Chinese see happening is the opposite. The US has come roaring back into leadership of the free world, NATO is united like not since 9/11, new countries are joining that will give Russia an additional 830 miles of NATO directly bordering Russia, and everybody in the West is rediscovering how invigorating it is to have a real cause and a bona-fide villain.
That's the last thing that China wants to see repeated in East Asia. And it would be if they make a move on Taiwan. We've been publicly and refreshingly blunt about that.
And China has a lot more to lose. It also lacks the lever that Putin has with the Russian energy resources. The Chinese economy is much more interdependent with the world than Russia's, which has been described as a gas station with nukes. China has a positive trade balance, but not by as much as you'd think: for 2021, they imported $77 for every $100 exported. And many of the imports are essentials like raw materials.
So if action against Taiwan triggered a revival of old anti-communist alliances in the Pacific, involving the US, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and other trading partners, and similar actions as those against Putin, that would be a scenario which China will be very reluctant to provoke.