"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.
