It's one of Hemingway's best lines, from The Sun Also Rises. "How did you go broke?" Bill asked. "Two ways," said Mike. "Gradually and then suddenly." It is a passage to which Xu Jiayin, founder of China Evergrande, China's biggest property group and the world's 122nd largest company by sales, can relate. For most of this year, his firm has been floundering, fighting off hordes of angry creditors, defending court actions and desperately trying to secure enough finance to survive. Now the situation has taken a sudden turn for the worse. At its peak, three years ago, the Hong Kong-listed China Evergrande was the ... (full story)