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A colleague of mine, who was a jump master and later an officer of the 82nd Airborne, had as part of his assignments the assessment of the capacities of similar units in the armies of other nations. It is his conclusion which I relay.
The Chinese do not now have either sufficient paratroopers or sufficient planes to take the airports and other key facillities on Taiwan in a lightning strike, and then hold them while tens of thousands of troops pour in on standard transport planes. China does not have that capacity now, even with the very bad assumption that all its paratrooper planes would get across the Taiwan Strait unmolested.
China is prepared to attack Taiwan with missiles, which would guarantee an American counterattack with conventional warhead missiles. But China does not have the capacity to put a winning number of boots on the ground in Taiwan, either by air or sea. In short, China could play out its version of a Bay of Pigs humiliation, but that's it.

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Furthermore, it would damage the economic infrastructure of Taiwan - I don't think the PRC wants to do that.

They want Taiwan, and they want it as intact as possible. That's why I think invasion is not what the PRC has in mind. It leads instead to a submarine blockade, which would be VERY hard for us to break, in my opinion.

The Chinese do not now have either sufficient paratroopers or sufficient planes to take the airports and other key facillities on Taiwan in a lightning strike, and then hold them while tens of thousands of troops pour in on standard transport planes.

Actually, China has just over three times as many paratroopers as the U.S. does. They jump very rarely by U.S. standards, if at all. (We had people make their first jumps on D-Day, so it can be done.) You are correct about their air transport capability, however. At their very best, they could try and put out a tiny fraction of their troops, perhaps a few battalions at a time.

This is assuming that a single transport plane makes it across the strait. It would likely turn into a slaughter, and an expensive one at that. China's air mobility is very very limited, and any planes they lose will mean no resupply, or reinforcements later on. Same with transport helicopters. They'd be eating SAMs and AAMs long before they touch down on Taiwanese soil, and China would be out precious war machinery.

For the ones lucky enough to make it on the ground, they'd better be ready to fight. Being stranded on Taiwan is going to be like being locked in a closet with hungry pit bulls. The Taiwanese army has very little land to defend, and they've been practicing for 50+ years.

I suspect, however, that if the US fleet was "neutralized" that in fact the PRC could do it. It is a fact that their official planning documents entail using fishing boats for transport. Thousands and thousands of them. So they have hundreds and hundreds sunk. They can still get ashore. Torpedos and anti-ship missles are pretty worthless against "junks".

They can't transport armor in fishing boats. But they can transport light artillary pieces.

What if, in a few years, China accumulated enough financial assets that they could say to the US: interfere with our taking over China, and we will wreck your economy

Consider this scenario: they finance some looney named Osama into taking out the symbol of American finance, and incidently plunge the US into recession. They then quietly give aid and assistance to Sadaam, and get the US to spend $billions on taking him out. In the process, this annoys the Arab world enough to make them raise the price of oil to further damage the US economy.

Then we find ourselves having to deal with a nuke-armed North Korea, and spend more billions on that.

Meanwhile China converts all its dollars to euros, sending the value of the dollar into a tailspin

Finally, a Democrat is elected in 2004, with the US economy in a crash, and is given an offer she can't refuse: allow China to take Taiwan, and China will bail out the US economy. Refuse, and China will manipulate the US economy into a 1930's-style Depression

Checkmate

Your friend may be right, but it is NOT the conclusion to which we came on the US-China Strategic Review Commission. Most of what we heard suggested that China has a considerable airlift capacity and lots of trained fighters with parachutes.

But time will tell. It is often a mistake to underestimate a potential enemy's capabilities.