Chinese companies are facing a reality check after years of ramping up debt. A crackdown on unregulated lending — so-called shadow banking — and tighter rules on asset management made it harder for some to borrow fresh funds to repay existing debt, leading to a record number of bond defaults in 2018 and 2019. When the pandemic put business activity on hold in early 2020, policy makers initially rushed to prevent another wave of missed payments. As the year wound down, private-sector defaults s