Will China be able to guarantee continued oil shipments safely reaching China? Food? Can China afford a slow economic burn while it blockades Taiwan for ambiguous gains?
Every year this becomes increasingly the wrong question to ask.
Who is going to blockade PRC? US?
Entire Malacca dilemma / anxiety / blockade scenario from 10+ years ago was underpinned by US having full naval escalation dominance with CONUS impunity because adversaries had no technical means to meaningfully undermine US homefront.
That leverage has essentially eroded with PRC ICBMs being able to conventional strike against CONUS infra in the last few years. PRC can simply run blockade and dare US to enforce by threatening to hit 130 refineries that sustains US existential viability. Fortress America era that has worked in US favour for 200+ years is over (vis a vis increasing PRC peer capabilities), if both PRC and US critical infra gets reset to zero, neither country has energy mix options or ag production (which depends on inputs derived from oil) that can even marginally sustain current society. The same ability to CONUS strikes also threatens major military capital projection assets.
The geostrategic reality when big bois have increasingly precise conventional long range strikes is US becomes Saudi Arabia, all the domestic production doesn't matter if you can't protect it against motivated advesary that has capbility to strike your extraction infra. PRC will guarantee continued SLOC access by guaranteeing US won't have access to any energy or calories if it attempts to to deny like access to PRC.
The pertinent question now is:
Can US afford an existential war with PRC for ambiguous gains? Medium/long term PRC incentive is stacked towards gambling an existential fightng US (using TW as proxy) to kick US out of PRC back yard, vs US who can afford to retreat to CONUS and pull strings as offshore balancer with intact navy and society at much less relative cost. US, by virtue of being hegemon has much more to lose if she gambles to lose everything versus foregoing something. VS PRC has everything to gain in TW scenario while long term game theory for worst case scenario is converging towards pyrrhic victory for US that would deter substantial US intervention at all.
With respect to TW, old nuclear consensus was PRC was more willing to trade Beijing for TW than US willing to trade Los Angeles for TW. US response at height of conventional military primacy was, if PRC wants TW than US, but we will impose crippling conventional costs in lieu of going nuclear. New conventional dynamic PRC is setting is, PRC wants TW more than US and if US tries to intervene then there will be existential costs on both homelands.
But it would be able to wage its war. For food it's fine, although people would certainly be eating much less pork for a long time. Oil is the critical limiting resource; China consumes around 15 million barrels a day. But it domestically produces 4 million barrels a day (it once was doing around 5, but shut down some as they became uneconomic), can scale up to around a million barrels per day of imports from Russia and Central Asia, and has a stockpile of around a billion barrels. Most manufacturing except for militarily relevant industries would be shut down, and it would impose domestic rationing to decrease its baseline consumption by a couple million barrels. Depending on how you model things, China could maintain its wartime footing for at least a year and potentially indefinitely.
Painful for China, yes, but also economically horrendous for the rest of the world. As soon as the war starts, all of East Asia would be thrown into an immediate depression, as at a minimum 10% of economic activity is shut down overnight. Oil prices fall, putting severe pressure on oil producers whose economies themselves collapse. The EU and the USA themselves tumble into recession, as supply chains are destroyed. Domestic politics would react negatively to the new reality, and there'd be no Pearl Harbor event to motivate Western voters to prosecute a war for an island most can't even locate on a map.
Everyone would be in for a world of pain, and everyone would want a resolution of the crisis as quickly as possible. If China starts a war, it will be because it believes it can maintain itself in an economic calamity longer than the US and its allies can.