Highly placed Japanese spokesmen, shocked by their reverse at Tai'erzhuang, and that at the hands of "secondary" troops, resorted to their favored way of dealing with setbacks. They denied for days not only the Chinese had won back Tai'erzhuang, but that the important rail knot at Xuzhou, of which Tai'erzhuang was an outpost, had never been a Japanese goal in the campaign, which of course it was - and continued to be.