🇨🇳 China vs 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd-largest and United Kingdom ranks 4th-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 United Kingdom is roughly 4.2× that in China ($63,640 vs $15,185 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: United Kingdom sits at 102% of GDP, well above China's 99%, meaning United Kingdom 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 $10K/sec for United Kingdom), adding roughly $6,821,625,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 20.8× United Kingdom's (68M), 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.