Hi everyone, Las La Montgomery here again, bringing you another China history podcast.

Today we continue our overview of the life of Deng Xiaoping and pick up in the year 1937.

If there ever was a year from Chinese history that will forever live on in infamy,

Ijio San Chienin, 1937. That was one for the history books. In the last episode we looked

at the early formative years of Deng Xiaoping. In this series of podcast focusing on the life of Dung, we're looking mainly at Ezra Vogel's new biography that came out last month. We reviewed the early years of Dung Shal, where he came from, his years in France, in Moscow,

and then back in China, surviving the long march, and now in January 1937, after the communists have started to set themselves up in Yen-An,

the legend of Deng Xiaoping really starts to gain momentum.

As we'll see Deng Xiaoping, like all of China's leaders at this time,

he had a lot on his hands.

He is in it up to his eyeballs in the whole war of resistance against the Japanese.

We know from previous podcast that Joiipa 918, September 18th, 1931, the Mukden incident, the infamous incident that went down in the city of Mukden, which we know today as Shenyang.

This incident was the ham-fisted pretext used by the Japanese to invade Mancheria, which of course gave us Manchuquo.

And now in the year 1937, with the Marco Polo Bridge incident on July 7th, 1937.

Now Japan has launched a full-scale invasion of China

into the heartland, so Deng Xiaoping is going to be caught up in all that

as well as other things.

The city of Tianjin falls on July 30th, Wu Song, which is present day Balshan, is taken on September 1st.

And Shanghai held out till December,

and there was huge and tragic losses

during the siege of Shanghai.

The Japanese then

set up a blockade along the East Coast that provided further inconvenience to the Nationalists.

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