I lived in Hong Kong until 1995. The Basic Law is supposed to apply for 50 years, so we should only be about halfway through that. The sense in the HK expat community at the time was skepticism that it would make it the whole way unchallenged, but that China "needed" HK, so it wouldn't rock the boat too much.
Of course, now that is no longer the case. Any optimism we had at the time of the handover was rooted in HK's economic importance but China went and built Shenzhen into a bigger, better Hong Kong within two decades. Still a Special Economic Zone but without all the pesky political baggage.
Considering China's relationship with Taiwan, I would say yes, we absolutely knew that China would not allow a Chinese territory to be outside of thr CCP's control indefinitely. If anything, I am surprised it took them this long to decide the rest of the world would simply watch and do nothing of importance about it.
China has been extremely pragmatic and results-oriented. When Hong Kong was the most economically successful part of China, they were happy to leave it be and learn some lessons from it. Now the rest of China has largely caught up and it's time for them to make HK more like Shenzhen, rather than the other way around.
Giving that Shanghai stock market trades more than HK, that argument doesn't hold up. China didn't need HK. They did not want a western-aligned population of 7M people within 40km of its borders and instead decided to deal with them with a heavy hand.
I think China played their hand too soon and the west is waking up to it.
"Shanghai stock market trades more than HK" is a strange rebuttal to my argument. You presumably mean that's true now, rather than 20 years ago when China decided to go with "one country, two systems" - which is exactly my argument, that Hong Kong is no longer the needed as a moneymaker. Either way, overall stock exchange volume is not a very standard measure of economic activity - at the very least you'd want to weight it per capita.
Of course China is motivated to have Hong Kong aligned with it rather than flirting with the West. Whether the West is "waking up to it" is not so clear to me. The HK riots were a big deal in the Western media for a while but now we've moved on.
A lot of mainlanders still prefer to trade on the HK market because the inside trader rules are much more strict and actually enforced (for now?). If you trade on the Shanghai stock market, you need to learn how to follow in the wakes of whales, it isn't for the feint of heart.
Their navy is nowhere yet ready to fight a real war. Look at analysis of their fleet. Two aircraft carriers with limited capacity. But any war would have home court advantage with long-range missile support from the coast. That's the difference maker. Power projection beyond China's coast is currently impossible with their navy, and if there were a concerted allied operation, China's Navy would be unlikely able to handle battles on multiple fronts. But nobody wants war, China is banking on that. Look at how the world did nothing about Russia annexing the Crimea. Nobody wants war.
