Now I know this headline is going to draw everyone in! In one of my Chinese classes, a fellow student told me an interesting fact.

Q: What nation is the largest consumer of alcohol per capita?
A: China

I immediately started to say how this couldn’t be so. When I was there, it just didn’t seem like people drank that much. Remember, we’re not talking about a few people drinking here or total beverage consumption but rather how much every person in your country drinks on average. And with all those billions of Chinese people, I just didn’t see it.

I had repeated the trivia question a couple of times since, always with a caveat that I thought it was false, and it always caught people by surprise. So I figured I’d look into whether it was true or not.

Turns out it is indeed not true, as I suspected. Here is an abridged list from Wikipedia. The same data can be found at data.un.org. The two numbers are liters per person per year and come from different sources, so the actual value is probably in there somewhere.

Rank Country Liters Liters
1 Portugal 19.49 18.54
2 Luxembourg 17.54 15.56
3 Czech Republic 16.21 12.99
4 Ireland 14.45 13.69
5 Moldova 13.88 13.18
6 Hungary 11.92 13.60
7 France 13.54 11.43
8 Réunion 13.39
9 Bermuda 12.92
10 Germany 12.89 11.99
…..
42 Poland 8.68 8.09
43 United States 8.51 8.61
44 Argentina 8.55 8.40
45 Thailand 8.47 5.59
46 Haiti 6.51 8.30
47 Canada 8.26 7.80
…..
89 Botswana 5.38 4.29
90 China 4.45 5.20
91 Zimbabwe 5.08 4.41

So it turns out that China is all the way down at 90th. I guess I’ll have to stop asking my trivia question now. Does anyone have one they can give me?

No related posts.