Hi everyone L'Lazel, Montgomery here coming to you from the China History Podcast.com.

We begin this new year, 2012, Year of the Dragon, well starting January 23rd that is, with part 8 of our Deng Xiaoping overview.

I guess this 8-part series was a good way to sort of get a chance to revisit different periods of Chinese

history through the context of Deng Xiaoping's life.

We touched on a lot of new things that hadn't been covered before, and I keep mentioning we're going to circle back

another day and focus in on some of the things we just skimmed over like

shechong shoon from the last episode. He deserves a whole podcast and we'll cover him another day as I

mentioned he's the father of she Xin ping who barring anything unforeseen like

the end of the world is slated to be named the new president of China and

party secretary. He's also a vice chairman of the CMC, the Central Military

Commission and it's no secret he's going to get that top spot too.

So we covered a lot these past seven weeks and there's plenty to come back to another day.

So let's finish off this Deng Xiaoping overview and we're picking up today after Deng hit a series of rough patches in 1988 and 89.

Inflation hit the country hard and then there was the June 4th incident and this put a huge

damper not only on China's image worldwide but also caused a huge rift

between the government and the esteem the people felt for it.

No, these weren't good days for Dung. After plotting forward for a decade, dodging bullets and

Chen Yun's Go Slow faction, always pushing back from the other direction.

Deng's reforms were really having a very big impact wherever they were put in effect.

Guangdong and Fujian provinces were the first major beneficiaries of the reforms, but by the 1990s the whole country was catching the bug.

Once China's economy hit the skids, this gave Chen Yun in his faction, carte blanched to put in a whole wave of measures

that really put a damper on the reforms. Chen gets credit, though, in putting his policies in place for dealing with the wretched inflation problem that hit everyone hard.

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