World Clock / China / vs Brazil

🇨🇳 China vs 🇧🇷 Brazil

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 8.9× more — a gap of $18.98 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.

🇨🇳
China
$21,395,868,679,152
Debt-to-GDP99%
Per citizen$15,185
Per second+$89,129
VS
🇧🇷
Brazil
$2,412,280,635,776
Debt-to-GDP93%
Per citizen$11,204
Per second+$13,210
In nominal terms, China carries the larger government debt — roughly 8.9× that of Brazil, a difference of $18.98 trillion. Note that debt-to-GDP (China: 99%, Brazil: 93%) is the better measure of sustainability than the raw total.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd-largest and Brazil ranks 10th-largest among the 137 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 national debt in China is roughly 1.4× that in Brazil ($15,185 vs $11,204 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Brazil's 93%, meaning China 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 ($89K/sec vs $13K/sec for Brazil), adding roughly $6,559,401,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 6.5× Brazil's (215M), 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 (April 2026, general government gross debt) and World Bank IDS.
Live data: /api/compare?a=cn&b=br · China page · Brazil page
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