This is planet money from NPR.
There is a real estate crisis in China right now, and it's a big deal because China's real estate market is really big.
It's the largest asset class in the world.
All in all, property in China is worth, according to some estimates, something like $60 trillion.
But over the past couple of years, that number has been shrinking.
And it's the property developers in China that are having the most obvious troubles right now.
They've started to miss payments on loans.
They've even been defaulting.
Of course, these things didn't just happen.
There's a long story behind how China's real estate got into this mess, a story I asked NPR international correspondent Emily Fang to help me tell.
Here we go.
Ah, there you are.
Yep.
Cool.
No one does it better than Emily.
No one can combine the on the ground China reporting with the deep historical knowledge that Emily has.
Stop it.
If I could blush, I'd blush.
I mean it.
And Emily, why don't we start here?