🇨🇳 China vs 🇪🇺 European Union

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 1.2× as much as the European Union — a gap of $3.11 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Analysis

This comparison includes an aggregate figure (the European Union), so it sits outside the individual-sovereign debt ranking used elsewhere 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 the European Union is roughly 2.7× that in China ($41,595 vs $15,611 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, above the European Union's 83%, 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 $46K/sec for the European Union), adding roughly $4,566,672,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 3.1× the European Union's (451M), 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.

More China comparisons