In 1971, David Bergamini, a journalist, published a very large book, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, which sought to prove that the Emperor was virtually the sole cause and instigator of Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s. Bergamini even believes the Emperor planned, among other skullduggeries, several political assassinations. The book is a polemic which, to our knowledge, contradicts all previous scholarly work, whether in English or in Japanese. It also contradicts the facts upon which this previous scholarship rested. Specialists on Japan have unanimously demolished Bergamini's thesis and his pretensions to careful scholarship.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 committed Great Britain to the defense of Manchuria, an area of the Chinese Empire which the Foreign Office and Cabinet never had considered to be vital to Britain's strategic or commercial interests. In the years preceding the alliance, British policy in Manchuria was weak and indecisive. The government consistently refused to run the risk of war and was genuinely concerned about the unacceptable level of tension generated by half-hearted attempts to maintain some semblance of the open door. Successive attempts to negotiate a diplomatic settlement that would provide a degree of protection for British trade while acknowledging Russia's special political and economic rights were wrecked by the uncompromising views of Sergie Witte. Under these circumstances, it was only natural that Britain should give serious thought to abandoning Manchuria.

The peasant unrest which marked the period 1850–1875 in China was not solely a matter of major risings such as the Taiping or Nien rebellions. These posed the most serious threat to the Ch'ing dynasty and received accordingly the lion's share of the government's attention, but the period saw an increase in more localized disturbances as well. Sometimes the harbinger of larger rebellions, sometimes their result, most often in response to purely local miseries and opportunities, local and regional unrest ranged from banditry and smash-and-grab raids on market towns to large outbreaks such as the Red Turban revolt which threatened Canton in the summer of 1854. Although there was the constant possibility that their sparks might ignite a more massive conflagration, much of this unrest was sporadic and confined, as the horizons of peasant life were confined, to a single district or to even smaller areas—market towns which lay on the outskirts of a district, particularly if the district boundary ran through hilly country, were standing invitations and encouragements to bandit gangs. Some parts of the country—the relatively prosperous, the relatively homogeneous, or those under the eyes and guns of major concentrations of governmental power—were relatively tranquil. In other areas, disorder became endemic.

It has frequently been asserted that the Chinese revolutionaries and the 1898 reformers, after making several unsuccessful attempts at cooperation, divided into enemy camps after the failure of their respective risings in 1900. This would suggest that by 1901, the lines between reform and revolution were clearly drawn. It has further been assumed that the decision not to cooperate was a result of the reformers' permanent rejection of the principle of seizing power in China through means of an armed uprising, and that all vestiges of sympathy for republicanism had by 1900 or soon afterwards been replaced by a decisive commitment to constitutional monarchy on the part of even the most radical reformers. Furthermore, although some evidence to the contrary has been pointed out, it has often been said that the reformers, both before and after 1900, looked down on Sun Yat-sen's well-known contacts with Christians, and his close association with secret societies. This implies that the reformers, themselves, were not interested in actively soliciting the support of Chinese Christians, and that apart from T'ang Ts'ai-ch'ang's 1900 involvement with the Ko-lao Hui, of which K'ang and Liang presumably either disapproved at the time, or came to oppose immediately after T'ang's failure, the reformers kept themselves free of secret society entanglements and operated on a higher plane. Finally, it has frequently been assumed that the secret societies themselves were practically devoid of any true, revolutionary spirit, and while at times anti-Manchu, were still ‘primitive rebels.’

The British government in India had two replies to Indian political activity. One was repression; the other was conciliation. There were also two faces to British rule: one of a permanent autocracy, and the other of an agency preparing Indians for future self-government under British suzerainty. It would be possible to argue that repression was the weapon of autocracy, and conciliation a necessary corollary to the approval of future self-government. The later history of the British period would then be seen as a struggle between two opposed goals, two different paternalisms.