🇨🇳 China vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd-largest and Japan ranks 3rd-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 Japan is roughly 4.8× that in China ($72,710 vs $15,185 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 207% of GDP, well above China's 99%, meaning Japan 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 $-6676/sec for Japan), adding roughly $8,277,552,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 11.4× Japan's (124M), 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.

China and Japan are both grouped under this site's “Asia-Pacific” region, so this is, in effect, an intra-regional comparison as well.

This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.