Abstract: The issue of minority groups is essentially the issue of how to deal with group and cultural diversity during the process of modern nation-building. This article extracts two key concepts from the study of the border area in 1930s and 1940s, namely, system building and stability of people, and tries to reframe the theoretic model to understand Chinese border and minority issue. “System building” means establishing administrative system in the minority area and implement effective ruling, while “stability of people” means cultural unity and national identification. In Chinese context, core of these two tasks is the balance of border distinctiveness and universality. Moreover, these two concepts can be used to comparative study of other countries besides China.