Word: changes
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...182.Of Tientsin's former militarist masters the last to evacuate was blunt, bearish Marshal Chang* Tsung-chang, notorious during the present Civil War for his ruthless cruelty (TIME, March 7, 1927). As Chang's armored train pulled out for Manchuria, he growled to correspondents: "I won't answer questions! How should I know how many men I've got left, or how much money I've got left, or how many wives I've got left...
Troops marching under the banner of the Nanking Nationalist Government quietly occupied Peking, last week, but in such curious fashion that no man could say with certainty in whose hands the city actually lay. It had previously been evacuated (TIME, June 11) by the great War Lord Chang Tso-lin, who retired to Mukden, Manchuria, and lay there, last week, nigh to death from wounds inflicted by an assassin's bomb...
Theoretically Chang's evacuation left Peking to be occupied without a struggle by the Nationalist Army. But that army was in three sections, allied rather than subordinate under a nominal Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. Last week Chiang was obliged to leave his personal army in the field, at a considerable distance from Peking, while he rushed to Nanking because of disagreement within the Nanking Nationalist Executive Council. Thus the first troops to march into Peking were 6,000 orderly soldiers of Chang's ally (nominally his subordinate) Yen Hsi-shan, the so-called "Model Governor" of Shansi Province...
Grotesquely enough Marshal Feng himself was nowhere near Peking, last week, but was advancing upon Tientsin with another section of his enormous personal army, which probably totals 100,000 men. In Tientsin were large remnants of the armies of Chang Tso-lin which recently evacuated Peking. These troops, said to number 30,000 and excellently equipped, were commanded by the wounded War Lord's son, Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang...
Third, the effect of this situation was that if War Lord Chang had fought a last engagement at Peking, suffered defeat, and then retired still fighting and chased by the Nationalists toward Manchuria, he would have found his retreat cut off by the Japanese...