Hu shi's play of 1919, The Main Event of One's Life (Zhongshen dashi), introduced spoken drama (huaju) to the modern Chinese stage, in imitation of the plays in the Western Ibsenesque tradition. Ever since then, May Fourth male playwrights such as Guo Moruo, Ouyang Yuqian, Chen Dabei, and others, in forming a tradition countering that of the Confucian ruling ideology, have treated women's liberation and equality issues as important political and ideological strategies (Chen 1995, 137–55). Female playwrights such as Bai Wei also depicted loving mothers and courageous daughters waging a fierce struggle against the patriarchal society, symbolized either by domineering and lustful domestic fathers or by new nationalist fathers already corrupted by the emerging revolution. The tradition on the part of both male and female playwrights of exploring woman as a metaphor for national salvation and a given political agenda was most fully articulated in the street theater that grew up during the period of the War of Resistance to Japan.

In the years immediately prior to Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, the historian Sin Ch'aeho posed a fundamental challenge to conventional assumptions about the limits of Korean territoriality: was the nation bound to the peninsula or did it more properly extend into the lands of Manchuria? For Sin, the answer was straightforward. Despite writing during the waning years of the Chosŏn dynasty—a time when the court could neither defy Japan's imposition of a protectorate nor resist Japanese pressure for Emperor Kojong to cede the throne, and when thousands in the Righteous Armies (Ŭibyŏng) were dying at the hands of the Japanese military in defense of the peninsula—Sin nevertheless called brazenly for a Korean Manchuria.

By the time the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–35) issued the above edict in January 1728, criticism of Beijing's new confrontational approach toward the native chieftains of southwest China had already reached embarrassing proportions. With increasing frequency, civilian and military officials in Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan referred to the state's abolition of native chieftainships as “senseless,” “a plan devoid of vision and purpose,” and “wantonly destructive of life and property.” Ortai (1680–1745), Yue Zhongqi (1686–1754), and several other officials recently assigned to the southwest by Yongzheng were labeled “reckless opportunists” intent on inciting disturbances among native chieftains and the indigenous non-Han peoples of southwest China in order to further their careers (ZPYZ, He Shiji 2a–3b; Ding Shijie 16b; Ortai 1:95a–b; Famin 21a–24b; YZSL 46:20b–21b). According to one influential official assigned to the southwest, “Your humble servant takes this opportunity to inform [the emperor] of the devastation and misery caused by [Ortai's] actions, in hope this policy towards native chieftains will be brought to an end and we can resume the strategy of peaceful assimilation initiated during previous reigns” (ZPZZ, Zu Binggui 1772.6).

During the period from 1795 to 1850, the East India Company Raj in India viewed forests chiefly as limiting agriculture. In Bengal, forested lands, classified as wastelands, had been included in zamindari (landlord) estates (Ribbentrop 1900, 60). Colonial administrators of this period also tended to perceive forests as being inexhaustible. Much of the woody vegetation, however, was not timber quality, being the product of a landscape long under shifting cultivation. The East India Company continued Indian rulers’ practices of selling blocks of forests or individual trees to timber merchants for a fixed down payment that encouraged great destruction and wastage in their extraction (Stebbing 1922, 35, 61). No attempts to introduce conservancy were made in the North West Provinces (NWP) or Bengal until after the revolt of 1857, even though the value of NWP sal (shorea robusta) forests was known from the time of the Gurkha wars in 1814–16, and the reports of Dr. Wallich, Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens in 1825 (Stebbing 1922, 66–67, 201).

Nineteenth-century observers of the Fuzhou area, both Chinese and Western, were struck by the worship of a group of deities associated with pestilence and epidemic disease. The local people called these gods the Five Emperors (Wudi). To Justus Doolittle, an American missionary stationed in Fuzhou, Proclaimed Zuo Zongtang, Governor-General of Fujian and Zhejiang: “the rival societies for getting up processions to parade the idols have from the beginning violated the law and corrupted morals, hence the evil must be stopped without delay” (Zuo 1867, 22). While these two observers each brought his own concern to bear on his perceptions of popular belief and ritual practice, they were united in their focus on the dangers the worship of these deities posed to public morality and order; neither was much interested in the identities or histories of these gods. But a detailed investigation of their identities and histories may explain how the deities were perceived as dangerous to public morality and order, and offers rich insight into the social history of Late Imperial China.