Page:Chang Tso-lin's struggle against the communist menace.pdf/25

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AGAINST THE COMMUNIST MENACE 7 BECAME MILITARIZED CHAPTER I

hostage in Japanese hands. Southern Manchuria was garrisoned by them; Port Arthur had had its lease transferred to the Tokyo Government; the North-China railway leading into Peking was patrolled by five Powers: and Shantung, though still in German hands, was soon to pass to the Japanese and then back to China. The whole conception of ice-free ports was forever killed, and Russia was back again behind locked doors.

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If the effect on all of all those mishaps was great, so was it in the case of China. China had not only been beaten in pitched battles by Japan, but she had seen Manchuria used as a cockpit and half the armies of Christendom pour into her Capital. All the metropolitan province had resounded to the marching of these men, so vastly superior to anything she had ever thought of herself. But she had set to work methodically and in three consecutive periods, in 1896, in 1902, and in 1906, she had expanded and modernized her forces until just before the Revolution of 1911 she possessed a relatively speaking fine army.

It was the great Yuan Shih Kai (whose military decisions in 1912 sealed the fate of the

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