Hausted was a colleague of Thomas Randolph, another "Son of Ben" from Trinity College, Cambridge - though the two were "rival friends" for a time, their conflict rooted in the controversy around Hausted's play.

Like other similar clashes immediately after the end of World War II between the communists and the nationalists in China, this conflict also rooted from the fact that Chiang Kai-shek had realized that his nationalist regime simply had neither the sufficient troops nor enough transportation assets to deploy his troops into the Japanese-occupied regions of China.