Having finally, and successfully, crushed a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China has declared null and void its treaty with Great Britain, the Joint Declaration that turned Hong Kong over to PRC control.

China’s deputy ambassador to Britain, Ni Jian, told the committee’s chairman, Richard Ottaway, that the Joint Declaration “is now void and only covered the period from the signing in 1984 until the handover in 1997.”

Never mind that the treaty the PRC signed was agreed by the PRC to run for 50 years from 1997, the year of the turnover.

This follows the PRC’s naked aggression in the South and East China Seas, as it looks to occupy those seas under falsified legal pretenses.

This government cannot be trusted. We—and the Brits—must govern our interaction with it accordingly; we can never know when the PRC will decide that another of its agreements with one of us has become inconvenient to it and so will welch on it.