UK has more than enough reason to maintain good ties with China

That a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said on Friday that a visit by British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond is welcome sends a positive message about the country's willingness to have sound relations with the United Kingdom.

Clearly Downing Street has done enough to smooth over the remarks of British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson early this month about sending the UK's new aircraft to the South China Sea, which former Conservative chancellor George Osborne rightly described as" gunboat diplomacy of a quite old-fashioned kind".

Sending a warship to the Pacific is of no strategic importance to the UK, except to send a message to the United States that it is still its close ally and will follow where it leads. It may also harbor the belief that sending its naval white elephant to parade up and down the South China Sea - as part of what the US likes to call freedom of navigation missions - somehow invokes the days when the Royal Navy granted the UK an overbearing sense of self-importance.