You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Episode 146, the new policies part 2.

We're back after hopefully only a few days like time between new policies, part two.

We're back after hopefully only a few days like time between part one.

Did you miss me?

I certainly missed you.

Last episode, as you will surely recall,

we introduced the figure known as Wang An Shh Shh, who rose from relative

obscurity as the son of a mid-level local bureaucrat from the south of the Yangza River,

to the dizzying heights of being perhaps the most powerful man in the empire, save of course for the Emperor himself.

He had done that by becoming a fierce proponent of economic and agricultural reforms so revolutionary

and with such ferocity that we virtually would have to go back a millennium to the

interregnum between Western and Eastern Han between the years 9 and 23 CE where the usurper emperor

Wong-Man of the short-lived Shin Dynasty, became perhaps the world's first radical proto-socialist,

see episodes 32 and 33 for details.

And so today we will be taking a closer look at these so-called new policies themselves and how they were enacted.

Then in part three, we will look ultimately at how they came to embody the very corruption and

wastefulness that they had initially been set out to unmake, best

laid plans of mice and men and all that, and then finish out with the fall of Wong Ansha from Grace.

The restoration of the conservative faction of government ministers to what they certainly would

...