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What China's economic problems mean for the world

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The world's second-largest economy, home to more than 1.4 billion people, is facing a host of problems - including slow growth, high youth unemployment and a property market in disarray.Now the chairman of the country's heavily-indebted real estate developer, Evergrande, has been placed under police surveillance and the company's shares have been suspended on the stock market. "If Chinese people start cutting back on eating out for lunch, for example, does that affect the global economy?" asked Deborah Elms, executive director of the Asian Trade Centre in Singapore."The answer is not as much as you might imagine, but it certainly does hit firms who directly rely on domestic Chinese consumption."But there are longer term questions for people in the developing world. Hundreds of big global companies such as Apple, Volkswagen and Burberry get a lot of their revenue from China's vast consumer market and will be hit by households spending less. The knock-