Chiang Kai-shek occupied Shanghai in April 1927, and began a bloody suppression of suspected communists known as the "White Terror". Within several weeks of Chiang's suppression of communists in Shanghai, Wang's leftist government was attacked by a KMT-aligned warlord and promptly disintegrated, leaving Chiang as the sole legitimate leader of the Republic. KMT troops occupying territories formerly controlled by Wang conducted massacres of suspected Communists in many areas: around Changsha alone, over ten thousand people were killed in a single twenty-day period. Fearing retribution as a communist sympathizer, Wang publicly claimed allegiance to Chiang before fleeing to Europe.