Is it true what I heard about our China debt?

I would have to Google it to be sure – as you can – but it makes sense. We don’t really give a lot of foreign aid and we do have a lot of Chinese debt.

I could believe it’s true, but only because the actual amount of foreign aid we give out is small compared to any real sum of our debt. We may dole out a few hundred million to some struggling African nation, but our debt is measured in trillions.

(but to be fair….. only around 35% of the total US debt is in the hands of foreign nations. Of that 35%, China owns roughly a quarter. So of the total US national debt, China owns roughly 8.8%...... the largest holder of US national debt? The US government itself, with 45–50%)

US Foreign Aid in 2009 44.7B (1), feel free to find a more current number, same calculation applies. This number includes military assistance, economic aid in 2009 was 33.9B (same source).

Debt interest payment to China 74.4M per day. (2) That’s roughly 27B per year. (74.4M*365days)

44.7B (aid) > 27B (china interest payment)

Therefore false; our annual debt payments to China are less than our foreign aid.
Keeping in mind I’m using our interest payment rate not what we actually owe in interest (they could be different) and a 2 year old aid figure (it could have decreased).

Foreign Aid is pretty unpopular in the United States. It wouldn’t surprise me at all, and given the current state of politics, it makes sense.

Besides, any bonds bought by China in the last 2½ years is getting an interest rate near zero.

This is not directly related to your question but I heard that the US still sends China foreign aid! Wow, kinda hard to believe.

It is important to note that China nad the US are very interdependent. I suspect that neither could stand or fall without the other, at least for now.

We owe China a tremendous amount of money – enough so that it has put the US in the position of being unwilling to antagonize the government of China by saying very much of anything concerning their violations of what should be the rights of the Chinese people. We are also very reluctant to address the very high levels of pollution originating in China.

@Linda_Owl The US says even less about its own human-rights and environmental issues, but I suppose that’s because it owes even more money to itself, eh?
=]

I have no doubt that we owe China much more than we give out in foreign aid. One of the reasons is that we never found a way to support projects in other countries that didn’t involve military aide. Probably because we are a very militaristic country. It is funny, we don’t have problems blowing up other people, especially brown ones, but are very stingy when it comes to helping them.

The good thing is that we are safe from an attack from China. Nobody blows up what they own. It would be very costly for China to destroy the U.S. and the Chinese do not waste assets.

Yes. Foreign aid, in spite of what people seem to think, actually represents a very tiny portion of the U.S. budget, between 1% and less than 2% depending on the year. I couldn’t find any numbers that separate out interest payments on our debt to China alone, well, I did but it would require more looking into, but they hold a pretty good chunk, Japan holds and even bigger chunk but we pay way, way, way more interest on our debt than we spend on foreign aid. The graphic above kind of puts it in perspective.