🇨🇳 China vs 🇻🇳 Vietnam

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 143.2× as much as Vietnam — a gap of $21.73 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 Vietnam 118th. Measured per person, China is 41st and Vietnam 109th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Vietnam 51st 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 10.5× that in Vietnam ($15,611 vs $1,482 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Vietnam's 30%, 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 $86/sec for Vietnam), adding roughly $8,574,508,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 13.6× Vietnam's (103M), 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 Vietnam 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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