World Clock / Lebanon / vs China

🇱🇧 Lebanon vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 214.4× more — a gap of $21.34 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.

🇱🇧
Lebanon
$100,000,000,000
Debt-to-GDP164%
Per citizen$18,868
Per secondstable
VS
🇨🇳
China
$21,438,625,031,964
Debt-to-GDP99%
Per citizen$15,216
Per second+$89,129
In nominal terms, China carries the larger government debt — roughly 214.4× that of Lebanon, a difference of $21.34 trillion. Note that debt-to-GDP (Lebanon: 164%, China: 99%) is the better measure of sustainability than the raw total.

Analysis

By total government debt, Lebanon ranks 59th-largest and China ranks 2nd-largest among the 137 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 national debt in Lebanon is roughly 1.2× that in China ($18,868 vs $15,216 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Lebanon sits at 164% 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 ($89K/sec vs $0/sec for Lebanon), adding roughly $7,700,745,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 265.8× Lebanon's (5M), 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.

Compare API ↗ 📑 Embed this counter

More Lebanon comparisons

Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2026, general government gross debt) and World Bank IDS.
Live data: /api/compare?a=lb&b=cn · Lebanon page · China page
World debt map · Rankings · Insights · Privacy Cookie settings · Terms · Contact