World Clock / China / vs Belgium

🇨🇳 China vs 🇧🇪 Belgium

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 26.2× as much as Belgium — a gap of $21.09 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇨🇳
China
$21,926,138,022,891
Debt-to-GDP99%
Per citizen$15,642
Per second+$99,328
VS
🇧🇪
Belgium
$836,605,964,803
Debt-to-GDP108%
Per citizen$70,131
Per second+$2,107
In nominal terms, China carries the larger government debt — roughly 26.2× that of Belgium, a difference of $21.09 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (China: 99%, Belgium: 108%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, China ranks 20th by debt-to-GDP and Belgium 15th. Measured per person, China is 41st and Belgium 4th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Belgium 16th among the 135 sovereigns tracked on this site.

On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the government debt in Belgium is roughly 4.5× that in China ($70,131 vs $15,642 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Belgium sits at 108% of GDP, above China's 99%, meaning Belgium owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $2K/sec for Belgium), adding roughly $8,399,894,400 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 117.5× Belgium's (12M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.

This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.

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Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2026, general government gross debt).
Live data: /api/compare?a=cn&b=be · China page · Belgium page
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