Word: tientsin
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Nightmarish Question. From the north came word of new difficulties. In Tientsin, the Communists cooked up a retroactive "income tax" for the last half of 1948. The tax bore little relation to income, was based instead on a firm's "past reputation and business attitude." There was also the nightmarish question of exit visas. No one had been refused a visa to date, but as more & more businessmen gave up in disgust and prepared to go home, the Communists set up increasing complications. Samples: applicants for exit visas now had to advertise their intention of leaving China...
...Taken over Tientsin...
Friday, Red Boss Mao Tse-tung loosed a tirade against the "sheer hypocrisy" of Chiang's peace message and countered with eight points of his own that demanded, in effect, unconditional surrender of the Kuomintang regime. In North China, battered Tientsin fell on Saturday, costing the government another 60,000 of its dwindling forces...
...week's end the Communists had set a time limit for a separate surrender of Peiping. With the fall of Tientsin, ECA cut off flour and wheat shipments to Nationalist China under a "watch and see" policy. Red capture of the city freed an estimated 150,000 Communist troops for new operations. It also gave them a direct rail route from North China to new Nationalist lines just 30 miles above Nanking. Defended "by less than 100,000 second-line troops, Chiang's capital was open to a giant pincer attack at two points: Yangtze River crossings east...
...seemed to have no thought of making peace except on their own terms. A three-day radio barrage hammered out an anti-Chiang theme built around oft-repeated symbols of "reactionaries," "war criminals," and "running dogs of American imperialism." The big guns of Communist artillery then poured shells into Tientsin, North China's leading industrial and commercial city, where a quarter of a million men had been conscripted to build defense works...