structural:reformatting, quality:corruption
Song to Qing

The next few centuries saw successive invasions of Han and non-Han peoples from the north. In 1279, the Mongols conquered all of China, becoming the first non-Han ethnic group to do so, and established the Yuan dynasty. Emigration, seen as disloyal to ancestors and ancestral land, was banned by the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Zhu Yuanzhang, who had a Han-centered concept of China, and regarded expelling " barbarians " and restoring Han people's China as a mission, established the Ming dynasty in 1368 after the Red Turban Rebellions. During this period, China referred to the Ming Empire and to the Han people living in them, and non-Han communities were separated from China.

Early Manchu rulers treated China as equivalent to both the Ming Empire and to the Han group. In 1644, the Ming capital, Beijing, was captured by Li Zicheng 's peasant rebels and the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide. The Manchus of the Qing dynasty then allied with former Ming general Wu Sangui and seized control of Beijing. Remnant Ming forces led by Koxinga fled to Taiwan and established the Kingdom of Tungning, which eventually capitulated to Qing forces in 1683. Taiwan, previously inhabited mostly by non-Han aborigines, was sinicized during this period via large-scale migration accompanied by assimilation, despite efforts by the Manchus to prevent this, as they found it difficult to maintain control over the island. In 1681, the Kangxi Emperor ordered construction of the Willow Palisade to prevent Han Chinese migration to the three northeastern provinces, which nevertheless had harbored a significant Chinese population for centuries, especially in the southern Liaodong area. The Manchus designated Jilin and Heilongjiang as the Manchu homeland, to which the Manchus could hypothetically escape and regroup if the Qing dynasty fell. Because of increasing Russian territorial encroachment and annexation of neighboring territory, the Qing later reversed its policy and allowed the consolidation of a demographic Han majority in northeast China. The Taiping Rebellion erupted in 1850 from the anti-Manchu sentiment of the Han Chinese, which killed at least twenty million people and made it one of the bloodiest conflicts in history. Late Qing revolutionary intellectual Zou Rong famously proclaimed that "China is the China of the Chinese. We compatriots should identify ourselves with the China of the Han Chinese".