A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  In December 1938, Phibun took over as prime minister. Since 1935, he had been the target of at least three assassination attempts, one of which aimed to kill the whole Cabinet. According to a royal insider, one attempt was ‘brilliant in its conception…and very nearly succeeded’.43 A month after becoming premier, Phibun claimed to have uncovered a major restorationist plot. He ordered the arrest of 70 people, including the conservative old guard in the People’s Party and leading royalists. After trial by a special court, 15 were executed, two were exiled, and another three (including the senior royal family member, Prince Rangsit) were condemned to death but reprieved and imprisoned along with 19 others. The lengthy court proceedings were published as a condemnation of royal conspiracy. The government successfully sued Prajadhipok for transferring 4.2 million baht from the Privy Purse to his private accounts overseas. It seized his palace, banned his picture from public display, and disbanded the Ministry of the Royal Household. Many remaining royalists left the country.

  Phibun appointed himself head of the army and minister of defence, interior, and (later) foreign affairs. The rest of the Cabinet was packed with military men, and the military subvention rose to 33 per cent of the total budget. When a group of provincial (mostly northeastern) MPs protested strongly against the increase in the military budget and other aspects of military aggrandizement, Phibun dissolved the Assembly. When the opponents were returned in the following election and threatened to vote down the budget, he began to by-pass the Assembly and rule by decree. In 1940, shortly before the Assembly was due to become wholly elective, he rammed through an amendment to extend the appointed half for another decade (up to 1953).

  Phibun awarded himself the rank of field marshal, which had previously been held only by the monarch. Early in 1942, he started to have himself referred to publicly as ‘The Leader’ (than phu nam), and to plaster the daily press with slogans such as ‘Our nation’s security depends on believing in our leader’. He commanded that his picture should be displayed in every home. He passed a series of authoritarian laws, including a press Act and an emergency decree that allowed almost unlimited arrest. Critics suggested that Phibun’s model was Mussolini, and that he was elevating himself into a presidential or even royal role. Phibun explained: ‘The campaign is meant to demonstrate that we, the whole nation, can act as one person’.44

  Moulding post-absolutist culture

  Phibun and Luang Wichit Wathakan set out to create a new culture for post-absolutist Siam by using the power of the state.

  As noted earlier, Wichit was a quintessential example of the new men of the 1920s who rose from commoner obscurity through talent and access to education. He served abroad in the foreign service and saw Siam from an international perspective. After his return in the late 1920s, he quickly made his name as a writer, publicist on the new medium of radio, and ardent advocate of nationalism.

  He was also a traditionalist who saw the monarchy as an essential part of the Thai nation. He was acquainted with the Pridi group in Paris but was not drafted into the early People’s Party, probably because of his royalist sympathies. During 1932–33 he served as a publicist for the royalist counter-revolutionary party, but gradually shifted his allegiance. He showed his skill as a political publicist in preparing the People’s Party’s propaganda during the Boworadet revolt. From 1934 onwards, he became a strong ally of Phibun. The combination of his extraordinary flair for popular culture, his official position, and Phibun’s backing gave him the opportunity to shape a new version of Siam as a nation in history.

  Wichit was appointed head of a new Fine Arts Department, established to help mould the public culture of the post-absolutist era. After the abdication, the department inherited musicians, artisans, and performers from the palace, and used them to create a new national theatre troupe. Wichit wrote plays for the troupe that used traditional historical themes but a dramatic presentation that was more western than royal-traditional. These plays popularized a new style of phleng sakhon (international song), which blended elements of traditional singing into a western format of the popular song.

  Wichit believed in ‘human revolution’, the potential for people to change themselves and thus the world. He wrote manuals of self-improvement, including Brain, The Power of Thought, and The Power of Determination, which guided people to be modern and successful. He idealized the Sukhothai era as the exemplar of Siamese civilization not, as Vajiravudh had done, because of its form of kingship, but because of its perfect expression of the freedom-loving character of the Thai. Freedom was important because it gave opportunities for all to contribute their talents to the nation. Sukhothai, in Wichit’s version, was so creative in art and language, and so productive in material life, because people had the freedom to produce. The resulting monuments, inscriptions and literature were proof that ‘Our forefathers have already created a high culture for us’.45 After the Sukhothai highpoint, according to Wichit, Siamese civilization declined in the Ayutthaya period because of the adoption of Khmer practices, such as slavery and divine kingship.

  In Wichit’s view, history was made by great personal achievements. One of his first works on return to Siam in the late 1920s was an essay on Mahaburut (Great Men, 1928), with capsule biographies of Napoleon, Bismarck, Disraeli, Gladstone, Okubo Toshimichi (of the Meiji Restoration), and Mussolini. Four years later he wrote another laudatory study of Mussolini. These figures were heroic because of their service to the nation. ‘Man instinctively loves his fellow men, his friends, his family, and his compatriots’, Wichit wrote, and hence ‘the division of humanity into nations is correct according to natural law’. Man’s duty was ‘to uphold the importance of the nation; think of the nation and not individual or sectional benefit in any endeavour; preserve the nation; and unify it through integration’.46 Wichit wrote plays identifying King Naresuan and King Taksin as great men who defended Siam from its enemy neighbour, Burma. But such heroism was not reserved for kings. In his most popular play of the 1930s, Luat Suphan (Blood of Suphanburi, 1936), the heroine is an ordinary young woman who rouses other ordinary people to oppose a Burmese invasion. The Thai were a martial people, including the women. Another Wichit play, Suk Thalang (Battle of Thalang), celebrated two sisters who defended Phuket against the Burmese. Corrado Feroci, an Italian sculptor trained in the monumental classicism favoured by Mussolini and now working for Wichit’s Fine Arts Department, depicted similar ideas on the Constitution Monument (Figure 11); a statue of Thao Suranari, the legendary female defender of Khorat against the Lao in 1828; and another statue depicting the villagers of Bang Rajan who defied the Burmese in 1767.

  Figure 11: The nation free and militant. Bas-reliefs prepared under the supervision of Corrado Feroci on the Constitution Monument (1939) introduce ordinary people into official iconography, but with the prime role for soldiers.

  Wichit further elaborated the Thai national character as constructive, detailed, aesthetical, and martial. Through this martial prowess, the Thai had become the dominant power in Suwannaphum, the golden peninsula. Also as a result of its advanced civilization, ‘Siam has become the heart of the Golden Peninsula, like Athens was the heart of Greece’, and thus other races had ‘come to settle…within the boundaries of Siam’.47 In his 1937 play, Ratchamanu, a military commander during Naresuan’s reign announced that the Khmer were ‘Thais like us’ but had somehow become separated; ‘all of us on the Golden Peninsula are the same…[but] the Siamese Thais are the elder brothers’.48 Chaoying Saenwi (Princess of Saenwi) dramatized the common ethnicity of the Shan and Thai. Mahadevi (1938) imagined a 16th-century queen of Lanna helping to unify her country with Siam.

  For Wichit, the Thai were, as the Nationality Law prescribed, those born in Siam and hence ethnically diverse. But in his songs, such as ‘Luat Thai’ (Thai blood), they were also mystically united into ‘one unified stream of blood which must never be broken into many streams’.49 The national anthem, rescripted in this era, contained the same sentiment: ‘we are
all of the Thai blood-flesh-lineage-race’.

  Wichit took little interest in the mass. He believed they remained poor because they were too ‘lazy’ to achieve his ‘human revolution’. He argued that the constitution guaranteed justice without any need for mass participation. Only states where the mass was highly educated qualified for democracy. Political parties were like ‘the brains of the nation’. He cited Aristotle for the assertion that, ‘From birth, some people are marked out to rule others, and some to be ruled’.50

  Because he chose forms such as theatre, song, cinema, and radio, which reached beyond the boundaries of high literacy, and because his works were absorbed into the curricula of the expanding education system, Wichit’s influence was broad, deep, and lasting.

  A world of rival nationalisms

  In July 1937, Japanese troops, which had invaded Manchuria six years earlier, marched on Beijing. In April 1938, Hitler launched the Anschluss into Austria. From this point, Siam’s emergent nationalisms – Pridi’s liberal version, Phibun’s militaristic one, and the lukjin affection for their place of origin – were bound up with the clash of nationalisms on a world scale.

  The Japanese invasion of China provoked another wave of nationalist feeling among the Siam Chinese, and a renewed upsurge of organizations and newspapers. Rival KMT factions, the Communist Party in Siam, and other Chinese groups cooperated to sell war bonds, dispatch rice and other supplies to the KMT forces, send 2000 volunteers to fight alongside them, and reinstitute a boycott of Japanese goods. Merchants who imported Japanese goods were blackmailed into making donations. Sixty-one were killed for failing to comply.

  The People’s Party had hitherto acted carefully towards both China and the local Chinese. It had placed some restrictions on Chinese schools but then revoked them when the Chinese Chamber complained. It welcomed a Kuomintang goodwill mission in 1936. Wichit inserted a song on ‘Chinese-Thai unity’ in his 1937 play on King Taksin. But the 1937 boycott again drew the government’s attention to the powerful Chinese grip over commercial activity, and hence the economy’s vulnerability to an external political issue. It also raised the issue of Chinese loyalties in the event of a war of competing nationalisms, and the possibility that Siam would get dragged into the Japan–China war as an enemy of Japan. The deaths of several prominent merchants in the boycott campaign, and of others by freelance gangsterism, rekindled fears about the Chinese secret societies.

  In July 1938, Wichit Wathakan gave a speech reviving Vajiravudh’s comparison between the Siam Chinese and the European Jews. He added that the Jews had no homeland, whereas ‘the Chinese cannot be compared to them; they come to work here but send money back to their country; so we can say that the Chinese are worse than the Jews’.51 He wrote another play, Nanchao (1939), portraying the Chinese driving the Thai out of their earlier homeland.

  The government doubled the immigration fee and closed two banks engaged in remittance to China. It cracked down on the angyi, businessmen, and political activists engaged in the boycott and fundraising. Hundreds were arrested and deported. All but one Chinese newspaper ceased publication. Regulations on Chinese schools were tightened, resulting in all but two closing down.

  The government also launched a programme to create ‘a Thai economy for the Thai people’. This was partly preparation for a possible war, partly an attempt to compete against western and Chinese firms through state enterprises, and partly aid for the ‘Thai’ peasants who formed the mass of the population. In the mid-1930s, the Defence Ministry began setting up companies to make Siam more self-reliant in strategic industries, such as oil supply and textiles. As the prospects of a widespread nationalist war heightened, this war-style economy was expanded. In 1938, when the Chinese boycotted Japanese trade, the government set up the Thai Rice Company. The economic minister explained that it was dangerous for ‘the country’s most important product to be totally in the hands of foreigners’, meaning merchants of Chinese origin. Phibun added that ‘rice is the backbone of the people…but people are poor because they are squeezed by middlemen’.52 The Thai Rice Company leased existing mills and eventually took control of 70–80 per cent of the rice trade. The government also set up a pyramid of companies to distribute imports and other consumer goods from the capital down to local markets.

  In 1939, the government imposed monopolies on tobacco and salt; reserved several occupations and businesses for Thai citizens, including driving taxis, slaughtering pigs, fishing, planting rubber, and selling petrol; imposed an alien registration fee of 4 baht; and in other ways shifted the tax burden onto commerce through levies on shops, signboards, and income, and increased rates on opium and gambling. In 1941, the government drew up a National Industrial Plan under which the Defence Ministry ventured into more strategically important industries, including mining, tanning, sugar, shipping, tobacco, rubber, salt, fisheries, and (!) the manufacture of playing cards. Most of these were existing factories commandeered from (usually Chinese) private entrepreneurs.

  Since the mid-1930s, two commissions had been appointed to consider what to do about the question of nationality for the large numbers of Chinese who had arrived in recent decades. A few first-generation immigrants had petitioned to adopt Thai nationality but there was no mechanism to grant it. In April 1939, a law was passed enabling people to change their nationality to Thai as long as they disclaimed any loyalty to China and proved their loyalty to Siam by speaking the language, changing their names, and educating their children at Thai schools. In the first year, only 104 passed these rigorous checks, but they were an important group. Virtually all were wealthy merchants, mine-owners, and industrialists. Their change of nationality provided the government with a group of ‘Thai’ entrepreneurs to help run the proliferation of new state enterprises. Ma Bulakun (who in fact transferred from English nationality acquired in Hong Kong) ran the government’s rice trading company. Wilat Osathanon, son-in-law of the late KMT leader Siew Hut Seng, and Julin Lamsam, member of one of the biggest rice-trading families, helped run the government’s wholesale and retail network. Under the cover of Thai nationalism and war, the rising commoner politics and rising lukjin business cautiously linked hands.

  The great Thai empire and the new Thailand

  Soon after 1932, some of the military wing in the People’s Party made plans to reclaim the ‘lost territories’ assigned to other states by the treaties of the 1900s. In 1935, Bangkok’s envoy in Paris referred to ‘the Siamese Alsace-Lorraine’.53 During 1935–36, the Ministry of Defence published a series of maps that depicted Khun Wichitmatra’s story of Thai migrations, and that showed the imagined boundaries of Thai kingdoms from the Nanchao era to Bangkok. One map showed the ‘full’ extent of Siam and seven pieces of territory ‘lost’ to Burma and the colonial powers between the late 18th century and 1909.

  After the Anschluss, a military lecturer claimed that the Burmese, Annamese, Khmer, and Malay were all of ‘original Thai stock’ and should be united with Siam. In 1939, the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient presented Wichit Wathakan with a map showing Thai-speaking peoples scattered across Southeast Asia and southern China. He exclaimed: ‘If we could recover the lost territories, we would be a great power…Before long we could be a country of around 9 million square kilometres with a population of not less than 40 million’.54 He began campaigning for the return of the ‘lost territories’, particularly parts of Cambodia and Laos. He travelled to the Mekong border and had the That Phanom shrine, one of the sacred centres of the Lao world, heightened by 30 metres so it would be more visible from the eastern bank in French Laos.

  The government distributed the map showing the ‘lost territories’ to schools. Army radio advocated building a maha anajak Thai (great Thai empire) on Hitler’s model. Newspaper articles and street demonstrations helped to fan popular irredentism. Wichit reasoned: ‘When the present war was over, there would be no small nations in the world; all would be merged into big ones. So there are only two ways left for us to choose, ei
ther become a Power or be swallowed up by some other Power.’ 55 Phibun agreed: ‘If you don’t want to be scum you have to be a Great Power’.56

  In 1939, the government issued seven ratthaniyom, often translated as ‘cultural mandates’ but better rendered as ‘state edicts’. Over the following four years, the series was extended to 12, and strengthened by other Acts and rulings. In part, these were attempts to strengthen Siam in the context of a global war that the country could not avoid. But more basically they showed the Phibun regime’s faith in the ability of the strong state to remake the nation and its culture from above.

  The first theme of these measures was to move Siam finally away from its royalist past. The first edict, issued on 24 June 1939, changed the country’s name from Siam to Thailand on grounds that ‘We are of the Thai race, but…the name Siam does not correspond to our race’.57 A later edict abolished the use of official titles from the absolutist era. The anniversary of the 1932 revolution (24 June) was designated as National Day in 1938, and subsequently elevated as the premier annual holiday, marked by military and cultural displays. In 1942, Phibun passed a Sangha Act, which removed the royalist Thammayut sect from its privileged position, and shifted authority away from the royally appointed supreme patriarch to councils of elders.