World Clock / China / vs Canada

🇨🇳 China vs 🇨🇦 Canada

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 7.7× as much as Canada — a gap of $19.05 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇨🇳
China
$21,881,640,830,541
Debt-to-GDP99%
Per citizen$15,610
Per second+$99,328
VS
🇨🇦
Canada
$2,831,314,249,740
Debt-to-GDP114%
Per citizen$68,337
Per second+$7,654
In nominal terms, China carries the larger government debt — roughly 7.7× that of Canada, a difference of $19.05 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (China: 99%, Canada: 114%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, China ranks 20th by debt-to-GDP and Canada 14th. Measured per person, China is 41st and Canada 5th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Canada 9th 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 Canada is roughly 4.4× that in China ($68,337 vs $15,610 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Canada sits at 114% of GDP, above China's 99%, meaning Canada 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 $8K/sec for Canada), adding roughly $7,920,633,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 33.8× Canada's (41M), 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=ca · China page · Canada page
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