The practice and process of identifying and categorizing the border population in China have persisted – albeit in different contexts – through the Qing to the modern period. In late imperial times, the demarcation of the borderland population was clearly grounded on the desire of the centralizing state to extend control as well as on the imperial rhetoric of “transformation through submission” (gui hua). Although Qing-dynasty emperors were in general more concerned with the regions corresponding to present-day Mongolia, Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan), and Tibet than with the border zone in the south, they did find it important to catalog the different peoples under their rule as well as to ascertain the degree of transformation or submission of individual populations. In the Republican period, by contrast, revolutionary and intellectual leaders were evidently less interested in sustaining an empire than in the creation of a modern nation-state. Although they did much to identify and categorize the “non-Han” peoples, most members of the elites were ultimately concerned with how and when the “non-Han” would be transformed through assimilation (tong hua) or enlightenment (kai hua).