Word: nationalist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...week of stunning, swift disaster in China. Nearly a million Communist troops along a 400-mile front poured across the broad Yangtze, Nationalist China's last great defensive barrier, and swept government positions aside like puny earthworks in a raging tide. The Communists moved in with impressive speed. In four days they took Nanking, cut off Shanghai, and captured half a dozen strategic Nationalist cities. They were driving hard for the rest of free China not yet engulfed in the Red flood...
...ultimatum for unconditional surrender. At 11 p.m., an hour ahead of schedule, shock troops jammed onto river craft and struck across in a vast envelopment on both sides of Nanking. One field army under General Chen Keng took Tikang, 80 miles southwest and upriver from the Nationalist capital. Other forces under General Chen Yi poured across 35 and 65 miles east and downriver from Nanking, snatched the river port of Chinkiang and the river fort at Kiangyin, whose big guns were silent...
...news that Huang carried in a five-inch-thick sheaf of papers for the government was grim. At Acting President Li Tsung-jen's big grey brick house, Nationalist leaders conferred until 2 a.m. Exhausted and ill with high blood pressure, Envoy Huang went to bed. It was no wonder. The Communists did not want peace-they demanded surrender. Their eight points of last January had been expanded by 24 supplementary requests. Most crucial: the Nationalists must allow Red armies to cross the Yangtze...
Just before his retirement to his native village of Fenghua last January, President Chiang Kai-shek thoughtfully moved some $300 million of Nationalist gold, silver and foreign exchange from Nanking and Shanghai to safer vaults in Formosa and South China. There it was put under tight control of generals and officials loyal to Chiang. If the Communists toppled the peace-seeking government of Acting President Li Tsung-jen and tried to occupy all of China, the gold and silver would serve Chiang's still-faithful followers as a nest egg for further resistance against the Reds...
Last week Acting President Li wanted the nest egg back. He needed it, he said, to curb inflation-although a lot more was obviously needed for that Herculean task than the Gimo's reserve. Li also wanted the treasure to pay Nationalist troops along the Yangtze in hard cash, thus boost their morale. To Fenghua went old Marshal Yen Hsi-shan, governor of Shansi province, to plead with Chiang for return of the funds...