🇨🇳 China vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 2.5× as much as Japan — a gap of $13.14 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, China ranks 20th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, China is 41st and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Japan 3rd 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 Japan is roughly 4.6× that in China ($71,305 vs $15,610 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% 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 ($99K/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), adding roughly $9,847,526,400 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 11.4× Japan's (123M), 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.

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