This chapter lays out the legal framework that enabled Hong Kong’s multiracial residents to engage with Britishness. It explains how the British nationality law enabled multiracial inhabitants in pre-war Hong Kong to make claims to Britishness. Using immigration cases, guidebooks, and census reports, this chapter shows when, by whom, and to what extent this inclusive legal status was recognized. Racial presumptions often prompted officials to deny people of colour access to their legal entitlements as British subjects. Nevertheless, colonial subjects in Hong Kong became increasingly aware of their British status, with some making active claims to their rights. In exploring the understanding and usage of British nationality law in 1910–45 Hong Kong, this chapter illuminates how nationality and citizenship were understood in an era when such concepts remained relatively new.

This chapter turns to the international presence of these four in the form of their pseudo-diplomatic representatives and the creation and operations of their foreign missions in the United States. Supporters and opponents of these aspirant states both recognized the importance of these nodes and every detail of these missions' existences was hotly contested. Because of their importance, these missions became political and ideological lightning rods, something which exposed political and institutional divisions within the US government as to what status should be afforded to these missions and their representatives.

In the aftermath of World War I, some politicians, scholars, and lawyers argued that individuals ought to be subjects of international law and bear rights within the international order. With the collapse of the Russian Empire and the onset of revolution, hundreds of thousands of Russians found themselves effectively stateless. Without a state to protect them, these Russians had no identity documents and no effective nationality. The League of Nations and the International Labor Organization worked with various states to create the first refugee passport system. However, unlike today’s system that is based upon someone’s “well-founded fear” of persecution, eligibility for refugee status in the interwar period was based, in part, on one’s former nationality. Even refugees couldn’t escape the tyranny of nationality as the fundamental classification of the individual in the international realm.