Diplomatic Channel

Since the Royal Navy has nothing better to do, Her Majesty's Government has used it on behalf of gallant little Formosa, celebrating the new Triple Alliance and giving a Churchillian V-sign to those beastly Heathen Chinee. Formosa, or Taiwan as the natives inexplicably refer to it, is a natural object for the affections of Her Majesty's Government, being a small island nation which traumatically lost control of its continental neighbour and whose glorious post-war government, under the decently-slanted Chinese Nationalists, dealt robustly with leftist metropolitan élites. For their own authoritarian part, the Heathen Chinee reacted to the Royal Navy's glorious expedition with regrettable racism, declining to identify the Britishness of the victorious vessel as if the American, Australian and aboriginal factions of the master race were somehow difficult to tell apart.