The bait was so tempting that the hook did not become apparent until too late. Then the beneficiaries of the Agrarian Reform discovered that they could neither sell nor rent the land, nor could they use it as security for loans. If anyone ceased to work his holding, it reverted to the People’s Committee, which allocated it to some other family. The State retained possession, in short, and the peasant remained as much of a serf as ever. Worse yet, the taxes disguised as “production quotas” eventually amounted to 60 percent of the total crop, which was more than the Japanese had extorted.[9] [9] Robert T. Oliver, _Why War Came to Korea_ (New York: Fordham University Press, 1950), 149. This is a sample of the methods used to reduce North Korea to a police state, just as similar states were being organized in occupied lands of Europe by local Reds doing the bidding of Moscow. In the Soviet zone of Korea all banks, factories and industries of any consequence were nationalized by the so-called People’s Committee.[10] Military training for offensive warfare was given to men armed with captured Japanese weapons. Pressure was put upon these recruits to “volunteer” for combat service with the Chinese Reds waging a civil war against the Nationalists.[11] [10] Dallin, _op. cit._, 291. [11] Oliver, _op. cit._, 5. _Red Victory in China_ Moscow was secretly backing the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung in their efforts to wrest China from the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Such activities, of course, were in violation of the treaty of friendship and alliance with Nationalist China which Stalin had signed on 14 August 1945. But agreements were never allowed to interfere with Soviet ambitions, and Moscow aimed to create in Asia a bulwark of Communist puppet states extending from the Arctic to the tropics. Asiatic soil was peculiarly suited to the growth of such institutions. Although Communism derived originally from the theories of a German revolutionist, Karl Marx, it was adapted by Lenin and Stalin to the political climate of Asia. Human lives and liberties have always been held cheaply in the East, and absolutism has been the rule in government. Communism, as it developed in Russia after the revolution of 1917, would probably have been better understood by Genghis Khan than Marx. For it is significant that no Western nation has ever embraced this political faith voluntarily, even though it has attracted a minority of radicals and malcontents in nearly every country. Asia was ripe for change after World War II. In spite of Japan’s defeat, that nation had made a good deal of progress with its “Asia for the Asiatics” propaganda. The Far East seethed with unrest in 1946, and Communism spread ominously through a China weakened by three decades of invasion, revolution and civil war.