ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes approaches devised by British and Chinese historians and intellectuals to provide objective criteria by which to distinguish their own imagined national communities. In the case of Britain, the text studies the connected ideologies of Anglo-Saxonism and Teutonism, their historical roots, their different interpretations, and also the manifold challenges that they produced both in the British Isles and the empire as a whole. A second section covers the changing politics of belonging in China. In this regard, the chapter analyzes changes in these approaches, ranging from the complex relationship between Han and Manchus in late Qing times, the dream of a Han ethno-state or the increasing acceptance of assimilationist theories during the 1910s and 1920s.
