The China Global Investment Tracker is the only comprehensive public data set covering the country’s outbound investment and construction. It includes 4,900 large transactions across metals, property, agriculture, and other sectors, plus over 400 troubled transactions.
The value of China’s overseas investment and construction combined since 2005 has hit $2.6 trillion. Verifiable investment recovered from Covid and zero-Covid but has not gone back anywhere close to the peak in the mid-2010s.
For at least a decade prior to 2015, Chinese wealth grew far more rapidly than official GDP and American wealth did. Since 2015, however, Chinese wealth gains have been uneven, and the American wealth lead has expanded.
In this report, I create a national wealth series for China using Chinese government data, based on the Federal Reserve's method of deriving net wealth.