Although the politics of inflationary cycles began in the late 1970s, the full manifestation of its dynamics did not take place until the late 1980s with the third reform inflationary cycle. The full flowering of the generalist faction's tendency to promote local financial control and the central bureaucrats' opposition to it occurred in the 1988 and in the 1993 inflationary cycles. The looming succession meant that junior generalists must firm up their own factions in preparation for the struggle after Deng's passing. This gave them impetus to devolve financial resources to their main provincial supporters. At the same time, these two inflationary cycles also reveal the dominant generalists' willingness to delegate financial authorities to the technocrats in order to preserve the status quo balance of power during crises. In the aftermath of the 1989 student protests and in 1995, Deng and his successor Jiang Zemin relied on the technocrats to stabilize the economy as they struggled to preserve or consolidate their power. Thus, the logic outlined in Chapter 4 continued to have an important impact on monetary policies in the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Examining more recent inflationary cycles also places the ideological hypothesis under rigorous scrutiny. Because debates over financial policies were tinged with ideology in the early 1980s, it is difficult to firmly reject the ideology hypothesis based solely on an examination of the earlier inflationary cycles.