aut vincere aut mori

The result has been growing pessimism about what Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology call “reluctant entrepreneurs”—poor people who run their own businesses only because they cannot find a job. “We are kidding ourselves if we think they can pave the way for a mass exit from poverty,” they wrote last year in a book called “Poor Economics”.

The greatest part of Asia is under Mahomedan governments. To name a Mahomedan government is to name a government by law. It is a law enforced by stronger sanctions than any law that can bind a Christian sovereign. Their law is believed to be given by God; and it has the double sanction of law and of religion, with which the prince is no more authorized to dispense than any one else. And if any man will produce the Koran to me, and will but show me one text in it that authorizes in any degree an arbitrary power in the government, I will confess that I have read that book, and been conversant in the affairs of Asia, in vain. There is not such a syllable in it; but, on the contrary, against oppressors by name every letter of that law is fulminated. There are interpreters established throughout all Asia to explain that law, an order of priesthood, whom they call men of the law. These men are conservators of the law; and to enable them to preserve it in its perfection, they are secured from the resentment of the sovereign: for he cannot touch them. Even their kings are not always vested with a real supreme power, but the government is in some degree republican.

The disparity between rural and urban incomes is also vast. City-dwellers make two-and-a-half times as much as rural Chinese—the widest such gap in any big country. This is partly because of a system of residence permits, called hukou, that resembles the pass system in South Africa under apartheid. People with a city hukou can live and work there freely. Those with a rural hukou can come to a city only as guest workers. Some 150m rural Chinese work in cities without the right to live there, in effect making them foreigners in their own country. They often cannot use public schools and clinics, and they are barred from public housing. Peasants who protest can be deported back to the countryside.