The US figures include coastal and territorial waters. The Chinese figures exclude them. This is supposedly because it’s impossiblebto know what water area is claimed by China.
However, China clearly has a greater land mass area; and measurements including accepted water area for China are bigger than the US including its waters.
Therefore, while it can be determined that China has a larger area excluding coastal and territorial waters, it is unclear which country has a larger area including coastal and territorial waters.
Because if they were consistent or honest, they’d have to admit that the US is actuslly smaller than China (or Canada, which they chose to exclude).
The US is bigger than China according to every source I found.
Wikipedia explains this quite well.
The US figures include coastal and territorial waters. The Chinese figures exclude them. This is supposedly because it’s impossiblebto know what water area is claimed by China.
However, China clearly has a greater land mass area; and measurements including accepted water area for China are bigger than the US including its waters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area#cite_note-12