[Armisael16]

I think it is surprising. The US has a larger nominal GDP (which is what matter for this calculation), and USD is also rather unique as the global reserve currency. 60% of USD are held outside the US.

These stats would seem to indicate that either CNY moves much more slowly than USD (which would also surprise me) or that there are also colossal reserves of CNY outside of China (which I believe the Chinese government is actively working to prevent with capital controls?).

Population isn’t that big a factor. India has 36x as many people as Canada, but INR and CAD have about the same total cap.

[z2trillion]

I think the site is reporting M2 for each of the currencies, which includes much more than just the bills + coins. E.g. the value of all USD coins + bills is "only" $2.1 trillion [1] vs. an M2 that's 10x larger. The 60% of all USD are held overseas statistic only applies to coins + bills and not M2 [2].

An explanation could be that people in Chinese save more and keep more of their savings in banks, compared to Americans?

[1] "Currency in circulation" in https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/20210506/ [2] https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/jp-koning/how-much-u-s-cur...