China

China: Deep Material Base, Restrained Reported Spending

Economic base

World Bank WDI figures put Chinese gross domestic product at about $18.7 trillion in 2024, supported by a population of roughly 1.409 billion the same year. That works out to $13,303 per head on the same 2024 WDI series — a middle-income figure attached to an economy of continental scale, and the central tension in any assessment of Chinese power.

The public balance sheet is more leveraged than is sometimes assumed. IMF World Economic Outlook data show general government debt at 106.9 percent of GDP in 2026. Against that, IMF International Financial Statistics report official reserves of $3.42 trillion in 2025, a buffer equal to a substantial share of annual output and a material cushion against external financial pressure. The supplied data include no breakdown of reserve composition, no external-debt series and no capital-flow figures, so the quality of that buffer cannot be assessed here.

Military weight

SIPRI's 2025 figures record military expenditure of $335.5 billion, or 1.725 percent of GDP. That share is low relative to the absolute sum, and SIPRI's estimates for China are built partly from items outside the published defense budget; the supplied data carry no uncertainty range, so the figure should be treated as an estimate rather than a reported total.

Correlates of War National Material Capabilities data for 2022 record 2.035 million active personnel and a Composite Index of National Capability score of 0.2341 — the index weights steel, energy, population and military variables, and China's score reflects industrial and demographic mass more than spending. Those manpower figures are three years older than the spending data, and no more recent count is supplied.

The FAS Nuclear Notebook puts the inventory at 600 warheads in 2025. No deployed-versus-stored breakdown and no delivery-system data are provided.

Governance

V-Dem v15 scores for 2025 place electoral democracy at 0.072 and liberal democracy at 0.039 on a zero-to-one scale, consistent with a one-party system without competitive national elections. State capacity is scored 0.209. That figure sits low on the index despite China's evident administrative reach, which suggests the measure is capturing something narrower than bureaucratic effectiveness; the supplied data do not document the indicator's construction, and it should not be read as a direct proxy for governing competence.

Energy

Our World in Data records 176.4 exajoules of primary energy consumption in 2024 and 10,583.36 terawatt-hours of electricity generation in 2025. Domestic hydrocarbon output is far smaller: 2,475.9 TWh of oil and 2,483.9 TWh of gas, both 2024. The gap between consumption and domestic production is the clearest strategic exposure visible in this data, though no import, pipeline or sea-lane figures are supplied to quantify it.

Sources: World Bank WDI, IMF WEO, IMF IFS, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, COW National Material Capabilities, FAS Nuclear Notebook, V-Dem v15, Our World in Data (Energy).