 As Harbsmeier points out (302), since this story appears in the introduction to the Gongsun Longzi, it suggests that the book’s ancient editors themselves took the theme to be how the scope of the extension of a noun such as ‘person’ or ‘horse’ varies when modified by an adjective such as ‘Chu’ or ‘white’. The main theme is unlikely to be part-whole relations, since it is unlikely that the noun phrase ‘Chu person’ was construed as referring to a whole comprising two parts, the state of Chu and a person. 