From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is Adelaide.

We begin in China where embattled real estate giant Evergrande faces a major moment of truth this week.

One of the biggest and most important corporations in China, which both fueled and profited from the country's historic housing boom.

Shares in the highly indebted company have fallen 80% this year is now on the brink of collapse.

Analysts fear the crisis could spread throughout China's property sector and the entire economy.

Weasing fears of a broader financial crisis in a country that prides itself on stability and control.

Evergrande was always thought to be too big to fail. Now where have we heard that one before?

Today I spoke to my colleague, Alexandra Stevenson, about the rise and fall of Evergrande.

It's Monday, October 25th.

Alex, most of us have never heard of this company Evergrande. But my sense is that if you live in China, it's a household name.

And I know that you have been reporting on this company for a really long time. So what should we know about it?

Yeah, Evergrande is a household name in China. It's actually one of the country's most prolific developers.

And its properties are in hundreds of cities across the country. It's rise and the rise of its founder, Shujian, really mirrors that of China's entire economy.

And it tells the story of China's early embrace of capitalism. And Shues' story is also really interesting.

He grew up poor in a rural village in the central province of Hunan. He has described in speeches memories of eating sweet potatoes and sweet potato flour and just being sick of sweet potatoes.

And studying under a thatched roof that didn't keep out wind or rain.

And he has described how he went on to become a steel factory technician at a state owned enterprise because it was still at a time when China's economy was mostly centrally planned.

But as he's sort of going through those early years and the workforce, China is beginning to talk about opening up.

And in 1996, a little more than a decade after he starts out, he decides he's going to set up his own business in the city of Shenzhen, which at the time was a special economic zone that China's leader Dong Xiaoping had first chosen as the place to launch an experiment with capitalism.

And so Evergrande is born there.

And so at that time, China was just embarking on this massive project of moving hundreds of millions of people from the countryside to the cities and creating new cities out of dirt villages.

And as they're doing that, Shue is selling the dream of home ownership to a very small but starting to grow middle class.

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