Mises attributed mass penury in Asia to the absence of 'a legal and constitutional system which would have provided the opportunity for large-scale capital accumulation'. Mises identified the fundamental problem as that of an egalitarian moral economy, which had licensed the confiscation of private property. China lacked the morals of the market he suggested, and without a transformation of mentality and morality, aid and industrialisation would be followed only by expropriation and the consolidation of centralised state structures.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 298