The most recent monetary cycle in China persisted for nearly a decade. Despite a seeming lull in monetary fluctuation under Zhu Rongji, the sudden surge of lending and investment in 2002 suggests that monetary cycles are by no means artifacts of the Deng era. Even as China established a series of monetary institutions modeled after Western central banks, politics continued to play an important role in driving monetary outcomes. The central technocrats' prolonged domination over financial policy began in 1997. Unlike previous times when they had gained such control, the cause was an external shock – the Asian Financial Crisis – rather than an internal inflationary crisis. The Asian Financial Crisis gave the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership a rude awakening on the economic front similar to the political shock they had received from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The crisis, however, was more anticipated than real because foreign exchange control minimized the possibility of capital flight from China. Despite the remoteness of an actual crisis, Zhu Rongji, newly promoted to the position of Premier, mobilized the State Council research apparatus to paint a bleak portrait of the Chinese financial sector in order to centralize financial power. Jiang Zemin, not wanting to risk any instability after Deng's death, abandoned his plans to pursue energetic growth and sanctioned Zhu's centralization policies.