In A History of Chinese Thought, Chien Mu observes that Han thinkers from Dong Zhongshu on made fanciful connections between cosmological and human events; scholarship became perverted, with the writing of commentaries on the classics replacing original thought, and scant attention was given to solid evidence. In this atmosphere, belief in chen and wei gained great currency.
漢代讖緯之說大盛，也成為王充發展「批判理論」的重要背景。