That is not the message you would get from the Chinese government these days, which is devoting an impressive amount of high-level political attention to this issue. Premier Li Keqiang just chaired a State Council meeting which urged banks to deliver more financing to small- and medium-sized enterprises, and at lower interest rates–the latest of many such meetings in which this topic topped the agenda.

In effect, small-business lending is being treated as an urgent national emergency: apparently China’s financial system is systematically failing to deliver what is needed for a healthy economy. Yet it is impossible to see any evidence of this emergency in the data presented in a white paper on the topic published by the People’s Bank of China this week. Here is a brief section of the appendix:

At the end of 2016, the balance of renminbi loans for small- and medium-sized enterprises in China was 42.2 trillion yuan (about 6.1 trillion U.S. dollars), accounting for 56.8% of GDP in the same period, higher than that of Japan (46.1%), Malaysia (22.9%), France (10.0%), Brazil (9.9%), Russia (5.8%), the United States (3.3%, where commercial loans under 1 million U.S. dollars are counted as small enterprise loans) and other countries.

At the end of 2016, China’s SME loan balance accounted for 65.1% of all enterprise loans, higher than Malaysia (43.7%), Brazil (36.9%), France (20.6%), the United States (18.5%), Russia (15.8%) and other countries, only lower than Japan (65.6%) and South Korea (79%).

In 2016, the average interest rate of loans for small and medium-sized enterprises in China was 4.77%, significantly lower than that of emerging market countries such as Brazil (33.50%), Russia (13.03%), Malaysia (7.22%), but higher than that of developed countries such as South Korea (3.58%), the United States (3.46%), France (1.50%), Japan (< 1%).

That’s right: China lends more than twice as much to small businesses, as a proportion of the economy or the banking system, as most other countries, and at a lower interest rate to boot (the data cited are from the OECD’s very useful cross-country survey on SME financing; you can download their detailed data for China here)

Of course, that doesn’t mean small businesses in China have problems getting bank loans–but small businesses everywhere have problems getting bank loans, because they are small and their credit risk is hard to evaluate. There is little evidence this problem is worse in China, and plenty of reason to think that it is actually better. After all, in an economy with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 250%, it is not particularly plausible to assume there are massive shortages of credit.

Almost five years ago I wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, my alma mater, entitled “Small Business Won’t Save China,” that made these points, and argued that a government drive to deliver aid to small businesses would not actually be very effective. Unfortunately very little has changed since then. Pushing credit to small business is still a politically attractive way of avoiding the structural issues for the private sector in China, and the political pressure on banks to meet arbitrary targets for lending to small businesses has only gotten more intense.