In Xi’s China, Little Room for Dissent

HK is a cannot afford in the sense that the HK polity needs an immediate cultural reset for One Country Two System to work. This leaves 20-30 year for another attempt at 1C2S. IMO The hope is to integrate HK into greater pearl delta, make future HK a compliant Singapore, which is maybe an appealing enough prospect for peaceful reunification if China successfully turns Taiwan into a rustbelt. The opportunity cost is letting HK go rogue for 30 years, which is hard 1C2S fail, and will ensure hot war across the strait.

For rest of China, it's more like CCP can afford not to have unrest than cannot afford unrest. The interesting figure in the article is ~200B on domestic security, comparable to US. Past analysis of Chinese domestic security spending (by lol Zenz) tried to paint Chinese spending as excessive, twice US spending when converted to PPP, but per capita, it's 1/2 US. Control is cheap, and I surmise will only get cheaper.