China pushes back on UK's Hong Kong remarks

This week, China pushed back against remarks by the British Foreign Secretary regarding the recent conviction of Jimmy Lai. Lai was found guilty of violating China's National Security Law over his role in the 2019 violent unrest in Hong Kong. Beijing rejected the characterization of the verdict as a "politically motivated prosecution," saying the British side is interfering in China's internal affairs and deliberately mislabeling a criminal case as a political one. Why are some Western governments so quick to label a criminal judgment as "political"? More fundamentally, who gets to define justice in Hong Kong—its courts operating under the law, or external actors applying their own political standards?