How did Asian countries challenge Western influences in the first half of the twentieth century?

Question

How did Asian countries challenge Western influences in the first half of the twentieth century?

Answer 1

In many ways.

In most colonial Asian countries their eventually successful independence movements were formed at this time.

In India the first widespread civil disobedience campaigns occurred in the 1930s.  In China, the transfer from dynastic government through a period of instability caused by civil war and Japanese invasion occurred, but in 1949 (squeaking in by a year) the Communists were successful and the "unequal treaties" were torn up.

Japan challenged them in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and a small kerfuffle that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.  The rapid Japanese expansion loosened the colonial grip, paving the way for independence soon after the defeat of the Japanese.