China

The China debt clock takes the most recent official snapshot from MOF, the National Bureau of Statistics, and the People’s Bank of China, and interpolates each instant with the published annual growth rates.

The method

Every card uses value(t) = base × (1 + g)^((t − t₀) / 1y). Base and growth come from the official sources this site has chosen, and the figures refresh at the next release.

What China’s headline excludes

The headline number is the MOF official central + local government debt only. It does not roll in LGFVs or hidden local debt estimates, which differ widely across institutions. The FAQ and comparison pages discuss those gaps explicitly.

Limitations

These are interpolated estimates. Always check the primary release before citing in policy or research.

Data limits and reliability

The live figures on screen are estimates interpolated between two official releases, and the next confirmed print can revise them after the fact. Not every series carries the same weight either, so each one is tagged by confidence — official (confirmed), estimate (interpolated), or proxy (a stand-in indicator). Items where institutions disagree the most, such as LGFVs and hidden debt, sit at the lower end of that scale, so for anything that matters, follow the source under each card and read the primary data yourself.

How to use and cite

When you quote a figure in an article or paper, use the snapshot API (/api/china/snapshot.json), which pins a single instant. Copy the baseAsOf and citeAs fields from the response and your reference becomes reproducible. To put the numbers on your own page, build an embed in the widget studio (/widget/studio) or call the public JSON API directly. Treat this site as a companion that adds a sense of time to otherwise frozen official statistics — never a replacement for them.