Shandong Province, who had arranged a welcome in his honor, with the United States Marine Band playing outside the main entrance of the cathedral. The Marine Band was attached to Naval Forces Western Pacific, headquartered in Qingdao at the time. During the Civil War period (1946–1949), missionaries in Shandong Province experienced growing tensions with the Communists, spurring one of them, Father Augustin Olbert, SVD to write: Father Olbert was appointed Bishop of Qingdao two years later. On June 2, 1949, the People's Liberation Army entered Qingdao and both the city and Shandong Province have since been under Communist control. Bishop Tien fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang government. 1949–1976: Under Mao Soon after the Communists assumed control, a combination of assertive nationalism and socialist ideology led to the eradication of the Western presence in China, including Western culture and products. "The denunciation of anything Western as 'capitalist,' 'bourgeois' and representative of the 'imperialist world' reached a peak during the ideological extremism of the Korean War (1950–1953) when the final vestiges of the Western economic and cultural presence were eradicated." Missionary and Communist ambitions simply were irreconcilable and the wide ideological gap could not be bridged. The stage had been set for the Communists' catastrophic assault on the missionary enterprise during the Civil War period (1946–1949) and the expulsion of virtually all foreigners in the early 1950s. Foreign missionaries who were suspected of being spies were arrested. Missionary institutes funded by foreign money were closed down and all foreign missionaries expelled from China. The SVD mission was not spared this fate. In 1951, the Diocese of Qingdao's Bishop Augustin Olbert, SVD was arrested, served 22 months in prison, and was then deported to Germany in 1953. Although the cathedral was closed by the government, Bishop Olbert remained Bishop of Qingdao until his death in 1964. Native Chinese clergy were not spared the government's Marxian contempt for religion during this period. Future Bishop of Qingdao Li Mingshu was sent to prison the same year Bishop Olbert was deported, and not released from labor camps until 1968. Sweeping arrests of Chinese bishops, priests, sisters and laity did not begin, however, until 1955. Afterwards, the Catholic resistance movement, encountering mass arrests and sentences to forced labor, was forced underground. Professor Jean-Paul Wiest, Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society wrote: "The witness of Bishop Gong Pinmei of Shanghai