The news that Britain might try to become a member of the 11-country Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP) at some distant point in the future misses a much more immediate point about the possibility of UK trade after Brexit.

As Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, pointed out on a trip to Beijing it is “premature” to start worrying about signing up to a diminished and untested regional trade grouping, which never included China and no longer includes the US.

The much more urgent question, therefore, is how the UK should attract and manage Chinese trade and investment after Brexit, particularly at a time when both the US, the EU and Japan are circling the wagons against what they see as Beijing’s predatory trade practices.

China is already a major investor in the UK. Over the last decade Chinese companies have ploughed nearly US$50bn into Britian - more than twice Germany or France - and it is clear that government believes Brexit could provide the UK a chance to attract even more.

But just as the UK looks to the future, last month at the WTO ministerial conference in Buenos Aires the trade chiefs of the US, the EU and Japan for the first time formally signed a statement promising to act in “trilateral co-operation” against states that unfairly subsidise their industries.