by Baker Chris
If we leave things like this, these big people (phu yai) will always make blunders, and little people (phu noi) who have the right wisdom and capability will not have a say. In the end this may lead the country to ruin. Or at the very least, we will not progress in line with neighbouring countries.11
Figure 9: Farming on the backs of the people. Cartoon from Si Krung newspaper, 4 August 1931. The caption translates as: ‘Cruel-faced giants don’t plough the fields but on the backs of the people’.
Second, absolutism fostered corruption and inefficiency. The cartoons that became a prominent feature of this journalism featured nobles and bureaucrats stuffing their pockets with money or running off with bags of loot. The court was ‘a giant leech, draining blood from the provinces, leaving the principal producers of the nation’s wealth to live in the forests’.12 A middle-ranking military official argued: ‘The national income was used to feed many people who actually did not work. In addition, the national decay and the inefficiency in the administration was due to the fact that there were many incompetent men in high positions.’13
Third, absolutism promoted foreign interests above national interests. The royal elite had become fascinated with things farang. It fostered profligate consumption of foreign goods to the detriment of the economy. The absolutist government had accepted unequal treaties that allowed foreigners to dominate the economy.
Royal nationalism contended that the king alone could lead the nation to progress. The new men and women turned this argument on its head. One summed up: ‘the absolute monarchy was the cause of this injustice. Nothing could be done to solve these problems, so long as the king had absolute power’.14
Within this general framework, specific groups within the new urban society had a specific agenda. Businessmen wanted to use the nation-state to promote the growth of domestic capitalism. They blamed the absolutist regime for concluding the unequal treaties and popularizing foreign products, with the result that Thai were ‘becoming the slaves of foreigners in their own home’.15 They wanted the government to erect tariffs and provide cheap capital so that ‘Siam would have more established industries, Thai and Chinese labourers would have employment, and Siam could produce for self consumption without having to rely on imports’.16
Commoner bureaucrats wanted advancement based on merit. They found that appointments, promotions, and salaries depended on birth, on connections, and on loyalty to the throne. They pressed for competitive examinations, standardized salaries, and promotion by seniority and merit – summarized as lak wicha, the principle of law and rationality. Vajiravudh replied that Siam’s bureaucracy was based on lak ratchakan, the principle of service to the king. Not until 1928 were the rules and practices of the bureaucracy formalized by legislation.
Urban labour also expressed its demands in the language of nationalism. In 1922–23, tramway workers went on strike for better wages. Labour leaders portrayed the strike as a blow against the tramway company’s foreign owners and noble shareholders ‘by labourers who are attempting to make a cruel employer realize that the Thai are not slaves and that the Thai nation must be free’.17
Perhaps the most significant centre of dissent was among the new men in the recently created standing army. In 1912, the government uncovered a plot among junior army officers to overthrow the absolute monarchy. Three thousand were possibly involved. Leaders had been recruiting support by highlighting the abuses of absolutist power, such as sycophancy, luxurious personal spending, and arbitrary seizures of land. They disliked Vajiravudh’s Sua pa corps and had been provoked by public flogging of military officers at royal command. They complained that ‘individuals who are determined to work hard tend to have no chance to show their capability, because phu yai do not support them’. They believed Siam’s progress required a change of government, comparable to the Meiji period in Japan. Their programme included a constitution, but was otherwise vague. They had no leaning to representative government, believing ‘the people in our country Siam still know very little about civilization and are very ignorant’. They proposed to change the formula of ‘nation, religion, and king’ into ‘nation, religion, and people’. Twenty-three were jailed for 20 years. All but two were from commoner backgrounds, and the two most senior were medically trained.18
Vajiravudh died in 1925. His successor, Prajadhipok (Rama VII), removed Vajiravudh’s favourites from office and announced his government was contemplating reforms in taxation, economic policy, the bureaucracy, and the structure of government in order ‘to do something at once to gain the confidence of the people’.19 The press became optimistic. But, in practice, Prajadhipok focused on soothing the divisions inside the court and finding ‘some sort of guarantee…against an unwise king’.20 He instituted a Supreme Council of State and filled it with five of the most senior members of the royal family. He set up a Privy Council and appointed 40 members of the royal family or the official nobility. A Bangkok journalist responded: ‘I think these people will draft laws to benefit the upper classes because all the members of the Council come from the upper classes’.21
Prajadhipok then considered the possibility of a constitution and a prime minister. Even though the sketched constitution unconditionally enshrined royal power, the proposal met opposition both from members of the court and from foreign advisers. Damrong, by now the senior royal adviser, felt that ‘the authority and prestige of the King would suffer in the eyes of the People’.22 Despite the growing public criticism, the monarchy clung to its paternalist ideal. In 1931, Prajadhipok told an American newspaper, ‘the King is the father of his people and…treats them as children rather than subjects. The obedience the king receives is the obedience of love not of fear.’23
Redefining the Thai
Historians like Damrong talked about the nation but then wrote about kings. The new urban intellectuals gave the Thai nation a presence in history.
In 1928, a mid-ranked official, Khun Wichitmatra, published Lak Thai (Origins of the Thai). His material came largely from the Sinologist Terrien de Lacouperie and a missionary, W. C. Dodd, who had travelled in southern China and noted the large numbers of Tai language speakers. In The Tai Race (1923), Dodd wrote that the Tai originated in northern China before 2000 BCE, moved south in seven ‘great migrations’, and arrived in Siam after the overthrow of their previous state of Nanchao in Yunnan. Khun Wichitmatra fashioned this into a new kind of history that centred on the Thai as a race, not just the dynasties that figured in works by Damrong. He extended Dodd’s list of migrations further back into history by arguing that the Thai must have come from the Altai mountains because ‘that was the birthplace of the Mongols’. He extended the history to the present and included a map of ‘lost territories’ assigned by treaty to French Indochina, including all of Cambodia and Laos. His aim was to make the Thai ‘count as one of the important races of the world’.24
Luang Wichit Wathakan returned from France in 1927 and rapidly became a prolific author, journalist, and early radio broadcaster. He reworked Khun Wichitmatra’s story into his encyclopaedic Prawatisat sakhon (Universal History, 1929). Wichit presented the main theme of all history as a race’s progress towards nationhood, and placed the Thai ethnic history alongside and on par with the stories of other races. Wichit also characterized the Thai as a martial race, symbolized by the country’s axe-like shape. Wichit Wathakan’s Prawatisat sakhon became the first non-fiction best-seller. Khun Wichitmatra’s Lak Thai was awarded a prize by the National Academy.
Other writers wanted to refashion the Thai language as a ‘fundamental ingredient of Thai-ness’ and ‘source of national life and tradition’. They criticized the growing use of English words; the government’s ‘addiction to Sanskrit’ for coining new words; the court’s use of long titles that ‘slow the development of the nation’; and the court’s specialized vocabulary of rachasap based on Khmer. These imports were ‘threats to independence’ and inappropriate ‘for the free peoples of Siam’. These critics wanted to simplify the
language, in particular by discarding the large number of pronouns that identified social status and were ‘a source of national division’ and ‘breach of democratic principles’. A nine-part essay in the press in 1929 was headlined, ‘The existence of the Thai nation depends on the Thai language’.25
The commoner nationalists shifted the meaning of a nation from the people enclosed within the national territory and bound by loyalty to the sovereign, to a community defined by ethnic origins, a long and unique history, and a common language.
Lukjin in a world of nations
The rising discourses of nation and nationalism complicated the position of Siam’s population of Chinese origins.
In the new world of nations, belonging and identity, like borders, had become more precise. In 1909, China passed a law granting Chinese nationality to those born of Chinese fathers. In 1913, Siam passed a law granting Siamese nationality both to those born of Thai fathers and to those born within the national boundary. This latter provision opened up a route for descendants of Chinese migrants to ‘become Thai’. But China’s law meant that Chinese in Thailand could claim dual nationality, and hence promised to add another dimension to the issue of extraterritoriality.
This mattered because the nation had new political meanings. In 1908, the Chinese leader Sun Yat-Sen visited Bangkok to raise funds for his attempt to overthrow the Chinese empire and form a new Chinese nation-state. He got enthusiastic support. Sun’s Kuomintang (KMT) provided funding for Bangkok’s fledgling Chinese press, which in return propagated his nationalist and revolutionary ideas. The government became nervous about the involvement of Siam-resident Chinese in the politics of China, and even more nervous that republican and revolutionary ideas would excite aspirations for change in Siam. Their fears were justified. Around this time, Pridi Banomyong, the future leader of Siam’s 1932 revolution, got his first political inspiration listening to a KMT propagandist in his local market. The 1912 military officers plot (noted above) occurred four months after Sun’s overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911.
The court’s fears were heightened by the sheer size of the population of ‘new’ Chinese following the late 19th-century surge of immigration, and their economic domination of Bangkok as both capital and labour. After the June 1910 Chinese strike paralysed Bangkok business for three days, Vajiravudh warned: ‘We must be careful. Their influence is tremendous’.26 Chinese immigration surged again in the 1920s, to its highest ever level, adding another half-a-million ‘new’ Chinese to Siam’s population between the two world wars.
The court’s attitude to the Chinese was also influenced by its bias towards the west. Since their return to Siam in the 1820s, westerners (especially British) had seen the Chinese as rivals for trade and for cultural dominance. In the age of high imperialism at the end of the 19th century, the west revelled in portraying China as a civilization in terminal decline. The Siamese elite, anxious to be siwilai, followed this lead. Borrowing from the anti-Semitism that flourished among European aristocracies in the early 20th century, Vajiravudh labelled the Chinese as ‘The Jews of the East’. In the 1913 pamphlet of that title, he accused the Chinese of refusing to be assimilated into Siamese society, being politically disloyal, expecting undue privileges, worshipping wealth as a god, and being parasites on the economy ‘like so many vampires who steadily suck dry an unfortunate victim’s life-blood’.27
In other writings, Vajiravudh differentiated between the Chinese who settled down and ‘became Thai’, like the ennobled jao sua and market gardeners, and those whose commitment to Siam was more short term, like the coolie labourers. Government policy followed this class-based divide. Labour agitators were jailed and deported, while businessmen were left alone. The KMT, though illegal like any political organization, flourished, especially among prominent businessmen. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce acted as its front. Some of its leaders sheltered behind extraterritoriality. Siew Hut Seng, who headed both the KMT and Chinese Chamber, was born in Siam but acquired British protection through his father, a Hokkien from Melaka who had become a successful rice miller in Siam. By 1928, the KMT had an estimated 20 000 members in Siam.
In 1924, a radical wing formed within the Siamese KMT. Partly, this reflected the rise of a communist wing in China’s KMT. Partly, it indicated the development of an independent urban intelligentsia in Siam; many of the activists were teachers in Chinese schools and journalists in Bangkok’s Chinese-language press. When Chiang Kai Shek purged the communist wing from the KMT in Shanghai in 1927, many activists took refuge in Southeast Asia, including Siam. In the same year, King Prajadhipok included the Chinese among nine ‘Problems of Siam’ identified at the start of his reign. He noted the surge in numbers of Chinese immigrants. He grumbled that Chinese in Siam ‘determined to remain Chinese’ and that ‘new and dangerous ideas are coming in from China’.28
In May 1928, a Japanese army killed and wounded 5000 in a clash with a KMT force at Jinan on China’s Shandong peninsula, provoking a surge of Chinese nationalist feeling. Leaders of the Bangkok Chinese organized a boycott of Japanese goods, which rapidly halved imports from Japan into Siam. The government moved to restrict the spread of revolutionary ideas into the broader population. It began to arrest communists after their pamphlets called for an uprising of Siamese workers and peasants. It banned the republican writings of Sun Yat-Sen, which a lukjin businessman had translated into Thai. But it still avoided provoking the business community. It refused to suppress the boycott of Japanese goods and made little use of new powers to restrict immigration after the Chinese Chamber protested against them.
This Chinese nationalism existed uneasily alongside Thai nationalism. On the one hand, many well-established Chinese became involved in Siam’s growing nationalism. They reacted angrily against Vajiravudh’s attempts to stir up animosity against ‘fellow citizens of Chinese descent’. They supported the Siamese nationalist press. They appended Thai surnames to their Chinese names and formed the Samoson Jin Sayam, the association of Siam-Chinese, to emphasize their identification with Thai nationalism. In the early 1930s, they pinned hopes on political change in Siam.
But on the other hand, some Thai nationalist ideologues had begun to imagine a Thai people for whom the Chinese were an enemy. They accused foreign merchants, both Chinese and colonial, of ‘sucking Thai blood to the marrow’. They argued that the flood of Chinese migrants made it ‘impossible for Thai labourers to find employment in their own home’.29 They demanded a programme of import controls, immigration restrictions, state funds for industry, and help for Thais to find employment. One newspaper called itself Thai Tae (true Thai).
The 1932 revolution
On 5 February 1927, seven men met in Paris and over the next five days plotted a revolution in Siam. They included three students at military colleges (including Plaek Phibunsongkhram), a law student (Pridi Banomyong), a science student, a London barrister, and a deputy at the Siamese mission in Paris. They called themselves the Khana ratsadon or People’s Party, using the Thai word for ‘people’ that the Bangkok press favoured as the opposite of ‘rulers’.
The intellectual leader of the group was the brilliant law student, Pridi Banomyong, then 27 years old (Figure 10). From his studies in the French legal tradition, he saw the importance of placing the king within the law under a constitution. From studies in political economy, he adopted the idea prevalent in post-war Europe that the state was a powerful instrument to bring about economic growth and greater equity. At the Paris meeting, the group adopted two aims: first, to convert the absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy; second, to use the state to achieve economic and social progress through a six-point programme that summarized themes developed in the Bangkok press over the previous decade – true independence, public safety, economic planning, equal rights (with no exceptions for royalty), liberty for all, and universal education.
Figure 10: Revolutionaries in Paris, c. 1927. From left: Khuang Aphaiwong (future prime minister), Pridi Ban
omyong, Thaep Aphaiwong, Luang Wichit Wathakan.
The seven recruited secretly among other students in Europe, and then in Siam after their return over the next few years. Their most important converts were a group of senior military officers, who mostly came from a commoner background and who had earlier studied in European military academies (especially in Germany). The leader of this group, Phraya Phahon Phonphayuhasena, explained that he joined because of ‘the birth of the feeling that in the government at that time high officials and princes acted according to their whim and were not willing to pay heed to smaller people’.30
Over the late 1920s, the focus of the press changed from criticism of absolutism’s failings to proposals for its replacement. More articles explained to readers the meaning of a constitution and the benefits of parliamentary rule. A few advocated republicanism. Underground communist groups distributed pamphlets about revolution. With the world sliding into economic depression in 1929, criticism of the absolutist government reached a peak. In response to business petitions for government to aid the economy, Prajadhipok wondered sarcastically if they wanted ‘the government to make a Five-Year Plan like Soviet Russia’.31 In 1927, his government had made teaching economics a criminal offence.
The government struggled to balance the budget by retrenching more officials, cutting spending on education, and raising taxes on salary earners. Investigations uncovered corruption in several departments, but punishments were limited to minor officials. The government refused to abandon the gold standard, which, critics argued, inflated the value of the baht and prejudiced Siam’s rice exports – further evidence of Siam’s subordination to the foreigner. Prajadhipok told military officers in February 1932: