During the winter of 1867–1868 the Chinese Foreign Office dispatched its first diplomatic mission to the United States and Europe. The stipulated time for treaty revision was drawing near and the Chinese government had reason to expect that the Treaty Powers, under pressure from their merchants doing business in China, would demand a considerable expansion of the privileges which they had forced the Chinese to grant them on previous occasions. Fearful of the internal effects of a great extension of foreign influence and activity, the Foreign Office decided to send a special embassy directly to the governments of the various Treaty Powers to plead for patience and forbearance.

Scholarly writings on the Chinese minority in Thailand have stressed the unique cultural values that traditionally have distinguished Thai from Thai-Chinese communities. Skinner and Coughlin, among others, have argued that the Chinese have traditionally been more diligent, ambitious, and materialistic than Thais, and that—while loyal and disciplined within the bounds of kinship and other narrow primordial affiliations—they act amorally in economic and other dealings with persons outside these affiliative structures. Thais, by contrast, are reputed to be more passive and fatalistic, less materialistic, and less likely to manifest social discipline or sustained commitment to others, even within the family. These value differences are held to be responsible, along with other factors pertaining to patterns of ethnic social organization and differential historical economic and political opportunities, for the relative success of ethnic Chinese in the non-agricultural sectors of the Thai economy.

A disproportionate amount of scholarly attention has already been lavished upon the provision for communal electorates in the 1909 Morley-Minto reform scheme, imparting to it a significance which it lacked during both John Morley's secretaryship of state for India and his lifetime. Most recently, M. N. Das has stretched the elastic material in the Morley and Minto collections—his only sources—over a prefabricated ideological structure; he portrays Lord Minto as a Machiavellian schemer, who introduced communal electorates in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the forces of Indian nationalism and thereby perpetuate the British Raj, and he assumes that Morley—who chose the Florentine statesman as the subject of his 1897 Romanes Lectures—was unable to recognize a twentieth-century facsimile. Without attempting to absolve two centuries of British rule in India of its Divide and Rule stigma, one may confidently assert that during the first decade of the twentieth century, neither the Viceroy nor the Secretary of State consciously implemented the pernicious theories which allegedly produced two warring nations within the bosom of Mother India.