World Clock / China / vs Lebanon

🇨🇳 China vs 🇱🇧 Lebanon

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 456.0× as much as Lebanon — a gap of $21.88 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

🇨🇳
China
$21,928,741,164,133
Debt-to-GDP99%
Per citizen$15,644
Per second+$99,328
VS
🇱🇧
Lebanon
$48,089,816,024
Debt-to-GDP139%
Per citizen$8,222
Per secondnot estimated
In nominal terms, China carries the larger government debt — roughly 456.0× that of Lebanon, a difference of $21.88 trillion. Debt-to-GDP (China: 99%, Lebanon: 139%) says more about the burden than the raw total does.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, China ranks 20th by debt-to-GDP and Lebanon 7th. Measured per person, China is 41st and Lebanon 59th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Lebanon 79th 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 China is roughly 1.9× that in Lebanon ($15,644 vs $8,222 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Lebanon sits at 139% of GDP, well above China's 99%, meaning Lebanon 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 $0/sec for Lebanon), adding roughly $8,581,939,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 239.7× Lebanon's (6M), 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=lb · China page · Lebanon page
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