Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 1.2× more — a gap of $3.62 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
This comparison includes an aggregate figure (European Union), so it sits outside the individual-sovereign debt ranking used elsewhere 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 European Union is roughly 2.6× that in China ($35,836 vs $13,961 per person).
The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 96% of GDP, well above European Union's 83%, 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 ($25K/sec vs $17K/sec for European Union), adding roughly $691,200,000 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 3.1× European Union's (448M), 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.