I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday story.

My colleague Emily Fang is an international correspondent at NPR.

You might have heard some of her reporting.

I have been covering China since 2015. I freelanced a little bit first, then I joined a newspaper

called The Financial Times, and then I joined NPR. I didn't know what I'd thrown myself into,

but I figured it out within about a year. It was a lot of it was just being

on all the time you know like your body was like a live wire because there was just news

coming in all the time.

Much of that news was about keeping up

with all of the geopolitical moves China was making

as President Shizhing Ping was reshaping China's domestic

and foreign policy.

And a few years ago, China's economic power

was on full display.

So a lot of business stories, because at that time,

Chinese companies were still going out and buying up assets all over the place

so they were coming to the US and buying like the AMC movie conglomerate they were buying

buildings in New York City but you could start to see cracks emerging,

debts that had not been paid, basically the cost of all that growth adding up signs that

this openness and this interest in engaging with the rest of the world

was starting to change under President Chiching-Pang.

After years of charting incredible growth, China's economy has finally slowed.

...