Hong Kong administration acting like a puppet government

LAST Tuesday, the British government issued its long-awaited six-monthly report on Hong Kong - something it has done regularly since the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, and which the UK government promised Parliament that it would do for 50 years. The chaos of Brexit and the change in prime minister may well have contributed to the delay in the report on the January-June 2016 period but the report, when it came, did not disappoint.

The new British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, instead of attempting to get rid of Hong Kong as an irritant in the UK's attempt to expand economic relations with China, voiced concerns expressed by his predecessor, Philip Hammond, about the integrity of Hong Kong's law enforcement, citing the case of the Hong Kong booksellers, who specialised in sensitive books on Chinese leaders.

Speaking of one of the five booksellers, Lee Bo, a British citizen, Mr Johnson said: "Mr Lee's involuntary removal from Hong Kong to the mainland constituted a serious breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration by undermining the 'one country, two systems' principle."