🇨🇳 China vs 🇶🇦 Qatar

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 233.6× as much as Qatar — a gap of $21.79 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 Qatar 94th. Measured per person, China is 41st and Qatar 25th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Qatar 61st 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 Qatar is roughly 1.9× that in China ($29,359 vs $15,611 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Qatar's 42%, 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 $84/sec for Qatar), adding roughly $8,574,681,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 439.3× Qatar's (3M), 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