British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, left, poses with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi for photographers prior to a meeting in Beijing Saturday, April 9, 2016.

Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Britain in October 2015 was a resounding success and has laid the groundwork for harmonious bilateral ties, but certain elements of the fine details still need to be thrashed out. As a result, Philip Hammond, the current British foreign secretary, visited Beijing on April 8 on route to Hiroshima for the G7 Foreign Ministers' Meeting. The atmosphere was cordial; Hammond's comment on the visit, and on his meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, was "We are building on the global partnership established during last year's successful state visit by President Xi Jinping, by working together closely on international challenges and strengthening our trade and investment links."

As active examples of this "global partnership," he included the newly inaugurated bilateral dialogues on security and peacekeeping, a new joint research fund to combat the serious problem of antimicrobial resistance, and cooperation on the specific security challenges presented by Syria, Iran and the North Korea.

Since President Xi's state visit, bilateral relations have been warm; the Chinese side spoke of prospects for a new "golden age" of Sino-British relations, and the British government did everything in its power to ensure the success of the visit, which produced a glittering array of commercial agreements. Since then, both sides have worked hard to put flesh on the bones of the framework created at the time of the state visit.

At the end of February, Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng came to Britain for the 12th conference of the China-U.K. Joint Economic and Trade Commission, and praised the joint bilateral efforts which "have given rise to a pattern of mutually beneficial, overall, sweeping and multi-level cooperation in economy and trade."

Certainly no one in Britain wishes to see any disruption to this pattern. But there are internal problems in Britain which might threaten the accord with China, and Hammond is intent on averting any such threat; it is always better to avert potential problems at an early stage rather than allow them to grow to a seriously disturbing level.