From the perspective of East Asia’s indigenous anticolonial movements, the Cold War reoriented but did not recast decades-long conflicts. For the region’s peasants, economic democracy was about avoiding or managing proletarianization, about land reform and the national ownership of national resources in the true national interest. Like most of the agricultural strikers in California, the “communists” in East Asia were more often working people struggling to reduce their level of exploitation via collective action in the face of modern capitalists who were always finding ways to get more for less, new ways to grind their laborers down. The Huk Rebellion in the Philippines was left-wing, but it wasn’t led from Moscow.ii The same was true in Jeju Island, off the Korean peninsula, where autonomous local popular committees governed until the Americans landed in 1945. Capitalist proxy governments had no choice but to treat these forces as capital-C Communists, both because that’s how the American handlers saw them and because if these economic democrats were to take power they would encounter strong incentives to align with the Soviets (as Mao did) or at the very least stake out neutral ground. In the late 1940s, Rhee’s RoK authorities responded to protests in Jeju with a counterinsurgency operation. They killed tens of thousands of suspected leftists while American military occupiers watched.