Battle of Nanking
At the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War Liu Xiang led the Sichuan 15th Army at the Battle of Shanghai and 23rd Army Group in the Battle of Nanking, and was made Commander in Chief of the River Defence Forces for the Yangtze River. In January 1938, he ordered his armies of more than 100,000 soldiers out of Sichuan to fight against the Japanese. However Liu Xiang soon died of stomach cancer on 20 January 1938, in Hankou, Hubei; some suspected he was poisoned by Chiang Kai-shek for conspiring with Shandong chairman Han Fuju to turn against Chiang.