World Clock / China / vs Germany

🇨🇳 China vs 🇩🇪 Germany

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 6.3× as much as Germany — a gap of $18.41 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇨🇳
China
$21,881,644,008,341
Debt-to-GDP99%
Per citizen$15,610
Per second+$99,328
VS
🇩🇪
Germany
$3,469,249,749,703
Debt-to-GDP63%
Per citizen$41,659
Per second+$10,367
In nominal terms, China carries the larger government debt — roughly 6.3× that of Germany, a difference of $18.41 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (China: 99%, Germany: 63%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, China ranks 20th by debt-to-GDP and Germany 52nd. Measured per person, China is 41st and Germany 18th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Germany 7th 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 Germany is roughly 2.7× that in China ($41,659 vs $15,610 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Germany's 63%, 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 ($99K/sec vs $10K/sec for Germany), adding roughly $7,686,230,400 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 16.8× Germany's (83M), 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=de · China page · Germany page
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