It was a valuable asset, 20 years ago, but the CPC has developed enough other cities to be large and rich. There are some excellent graphs if you search that s

It was a valuable asset, 20 years ago, but the CPC has developed enough other cities to be large and rich. There are some excellent graphs if you search that show the relative % of the Chinese economy that HK was in 1980 vs now. Now it is a much smaller portion of the total economy. The CPC is now considering that HK might be sacrifice necessary to maintain their authoritarian control over China because they cannot allow the ideas of human rights to spread to the mainland china population.