A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  Coastal waters were another focus of competition. From the 1960s, the marine fish catch increased from 0.4 million to 3 million tons a year because of new large-scale technology and the promotion of seafood exports. Stocks began to decline steeply in the early 1990s. Small-scale fishermen were supposedly protected by a 3-kilometre exclusion zone for trawls and push-nets, but the law was poorly enforced. In the early 1990s, coastal communities petitioned authorities to enforce the law and occasionally blockaded fishing harbours in protest.

  The rapid exploitation of natural resources, begun as the foundation of ‘development’ in the American era, had transformed Thailand from a resource-abundant into a resource-scarce country within a single generation. While poverty diminished steadily over the long boom, the division between rich and poor grew steadily worse over four decades. Primarily this was a division between urban and rural, and especially between the capital and the periphery – in particular, the northern hills, the southern border provinces, and the resource-poor northeast.

  Rural resistance

  The first NGOs were established in the late 1960s. Their progenitors were Dr Puey Ungphakon, the outstanding technocrat with an interest in social justice, and Sulak Sivaraksa, the activist-journalist and advocate of this-worldly Buddhism. In the 1976 terror, both were forced to flee overseas, permanently in the case of Puey. From the late 1970s, several of the 1973–76 veterans took up NGO work as an alternative route to social change, avoiding the political polarization and violence of 1976. In the early 1980s, a movement of ‘development’ monks began to apply the teaching of this-worldly Buddhism that monks should work for social improvement.

  In the mid-1980s, several activists in this fledgling NGO movement began to argue that the top-down development policy adopted since the 1960s had failed to improve the lives of the majority of people; rather, it had brought great social and emotional disruption. Top-down development demanded that villagers change to a more modern, scientific, and market-rational way of operation. By contrast, the activists argued that development should be rooted in villagers’ own knowledge, and should try to strengthen local culture and preserve village-style social relationships, since these were inherently more humane and more in line with Buddhist values than those of urban capitalist society. Seri Phongphit, a former Catholic priest and university lecturer, said: ‘Let [the people] be themselves; let them be subject to their development; give them back their power, their decision, their education, their health, their government, their values, their self-respect, [their] confidence’.9 This approach was dubbed the ‘community culture movement’ and became a guiding principle for many NGOs.

  In the mid-1980s, the environmental movement provided another source of support. In 1982, the government proposed to build the Nam Choan dam, which would flood 223 square kilometres of one of the largest remaining forest tracts in mainland Southeast Asia. The protest brought together local villagers threatened with displacement, activists from nearby towns, Thai NGOs, journalists, academics, monks, singers, and international environmental groups. The protest forced the government to delay the project and finally cancel it in 1988. This experience founded several new NGOs, which provided a bridge between local protests, middle-class sympathizers, and the international environmental movement.

  In the early 1980s during the anti-communist campaign, army patrols and vigilante networks intimidated the countryside into silence. The few who resisted this regime were quietly ‘dealt with’. But over the decade, the pressure gradually lifted. A new cadre of rural leaders emerged. Some, like the Karen leader Joni Odochao, had worked with NGOs. Some were villagers who had climbed the education pyramid and returned home to become local teachers. Some had gained urban experience as migrant workers. The northeastern leader, Bamrung Kayota, had been a migrant worker and labour leader in Bangkok in the 1973–76 era.

  In the early 1990s, several protests gelled into new organizations. Northeastern groups protested against failed government schemes of agricultural innovation, which had left them with large debts. Other groups protested against a massive army scheme (Kho Jo Ko) to move 6 million ‘squatters’ out of 1253 ‘forest’ areas. These two protests then joined forces to oppose a government scheme to form an Agricultural Council that would offer agribusinesses, but not small farmers, an influence over policy making. From these events came the foundation of the Small-scale Farmers of the Northeast. In parallel, protests against evictions of forest dwellers in the northern hills led to the creation of the Northern Farmers Network.

  Out of these events also came a new strategy of protest. To oppose the Kho Jo Ko forest clearances, farmers marched towards Bangkok along the Mitraphap highway, the first of the US-financed roads built into the region three decades earlier (Figure 21). The government dispatched ministers by helicopter to negotiate an agreement by the roadside before the march descended the escarpment onto the central plain. Kho Jo Ko was abandoned.

  Figure 21: Farmers walk into politics. March along the Mitraphap highway in protest at the Kho Jo Ko land resettlement scheme in June 1992.

  Over the next three years, the northeastern groups repeated this strategy to press a slate of issues that included agrarian debt, falling crop prices, access to forests, compensation for old dam projects, and cancellation of new ones. The Northern Farmers Network led a similar march through the Chiang Mai valley on issues of land and citizens’ rights for hill peoples. In December 1995, a new umbrella organization was formed. The Assembly of the Poor was a loose network of local protests with no leader and only a skeletal organization of NGO ‘advisers’. Its name was a deliberately accusatory polemic aimed at a prospering city. The Assembly gathered together northeastern farmers, northern hill-dwellers demanding nationality and land rights, southern fishing communities threatened by big trawlers’ depletion of fish stocks, and a few urban labouring groups. In 1996, it brought thousands of protesters into the city and negotiated an agreement with the prime minister, which lapsed when the government fell shortly after. In 1997, the Assembly brought more than 20 000 for a sustained 99-day protest and negotiation with the government, which ended with an unprecedented raft of concessions, including compensation of 4.7 billion baht for villagers displaced by dams, recognition that settlers could remain in ‘forests’, and review of several pending dam schemes. But the government fell at the end of the year and its successor revoked most of the concessions.

  The Assembly of the Poor was the high-profile peak of a swelling movement of rural protest. The 1997 economic crisis further stoked dissent. In 1998, crop prices fell and input prices rose as the value of the baht depreciated; remittances from the city dwindled; and many migrants were thrown back on the support of the rural household, at least temporarily between job searches. In early 1998, several rural organizations demanded relief for rural debt. Over the next two years, many farmer groups blocked roads or marched to the city to demand government intervention to support crop prices. The Assembly of the Poor demanded restoration of the dam compensation payments and opening of the sluice gates on the Pak Mun dam, a small hydro project that had devastated the ecology and fisheries of the lower Mun River. The aggrieved fishing communities camped semi-permanently outside Government House. In the north, where the government had persisted with attempts to clear the forests by defining more areas as national parks, hill villagers protested against (often violent) attempts at eviction.

  Local groups became bolder in protest at large infrastructure projects that the government planned with no local consultation and perfunctory environmental assessments. Protesters failed to halt the building of the Yadana pipeline bringing natural gas from Burma through the western forests, but blocked (at least temporarily) plans for two coal-fired power stations on the east coast of the peninsula. After the World Commission on Dams condemned the Pak Mun dam, the electricity authority abandoned other planned hydro projects. A proposed gas pipeline across the southern tip of Thailand into Malaysia provoked three violent clashes between protesters an
d police. In several places, villages resisted the siting of waste disposal schemes.

  In sum, as the urban economy increasingly attracted investment and government attention, the likelihood of a full-blown capitalist transformation of agriculture receded. The countryside remained an economy of smallholder farms, though more tied to the market than ever before. The countryside’s contribution to the economy drastically fell, but the numbers living in the villages declined more slowly – to just under half the total population at the turn of the millennium. This semi-peasant society was too varied, too fragmented, and too weighted by history to translate its numbers into equivalent power in a parliamentary democracy designed and dominated by urban interests. But from the early 1990s, rural groups were able to exploit new political spaces in media, in academic and policy debate, and on the national highways and city pavements. As one leader said: ‘The power of the soldier is in his gun. The power of the businessman is in his money…From our experience, the power of the poor is in our feet’.10

  The peasant had ceased to be the ‘backbone of the nation’, either as a producer of the national wealth, or as an imagined passive supporter of the political order. Against this background of growing protest, the state’s policy towards the countryside gradually changed. In the late 1980s, the state stopped taxing agriculture and started providing subsidies. Schemes for crop pledging and price guarantees were initially short term and often geographically restricted, but gradually became more widespread and regular. By 2006, a quarter of the rice crop was subsidised. The spread of these schemes was a direct result of elective government. Political parties proffered these schemes because they were popular and because they produced a tangible achievement by reducing numbers below the poverty line.

  Government also increased its spending on roads that linked villages to the market, on irrigation schemes, on extension work, and on community development. Aside from their impact in boosting incomes, these schemes employed more and more people from the villages, either full- or part-time. Government also encouraged the spread of contract farming for fruit, vegetables, flowers, soyabean, and jasmine rice. Some farmers and some academics opposed contract farming projects as exploitative, but generally farmers welcomed them as they reduced risk, brought in capital, and overcame the problem of accessing markets. Starting with a World Bank project in the 1980s, government gradually extended secure land titles to over 20 million hectares, covering most agricultural land outside areas designated as forests or national parks.

  These changes did not transform rural society but helped to sustain the pattern of small-scale family farming. Households continued to supplement agricultural earning by tapping the rising wealth of the urban economy through migration. In one remote village in the northeast surveyed in the 2000s, households had younger members working in 16 of Thailand’s provinces as well as Laos, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the Netherlands. Moreover, the remittance flows and government spending were gradually giving the local economy a more urban character. Villagers had opened a beauty salon, barber shop, rental car business, tractor hire business, rice mill, car repair shop, grocery and small restaurant. Several were working for government agencies.

  Compared to their parents, a rural family in the early 21st century had three times as much income. Aspirations rose along with income. Families embraced education because it offered a chance for their children to escape from agriculture. Whereas their parents’ horizons had been largely limited to the village and locality, the new generation travelled to work in Bangkok and overseas, and accessed the outside world daily through television and increasingly through the internet. People were able to see with their own eyes the great inequalities in Thailand, not only the massive gap in incomes between village and city, but also the very different quantity and quality of public services, and the big differences in status, dignity, and respect at different levels of society. In the early 21st century, resentment of inequality crept into political discourse. A demonstrator in 2010 explained, ‘What we mean by democracy is fairness…We want fairness in three ways: legal, political, and educational.’11 This concern did not arise because inequality was rising (in fact it had begun to fall, slowly) but because more people were aware of it, and resented it.

  Whereas for their parents, government had been something remote and probably malevolent, for the new generation the situation had become more complex. In the rural economy, government now loomed large as a patron, employer, and banker. As a consequence, people had growing expectations about government’s duty to provide them with help, and were increasingly drawn into the politics of negotiating with government at every level from locality to nation.

  This combination of rising incomes, rising aspirations, growing resentment of inequalities, and rising expectations of government would transform Thai politics in the early 21st century.

  The coming of mass society: print

  Over the last quarter of the 20th century, a mass society emerged. More people were more deeply involved in a national economy. Communications shrank social space. The spread of mass media created a mirror in which the society was reflected and became more conscious of itself.

  In 1975, nine-tenths of the working population had at least primary education, but only 6 per cent or just over a million people had gained secondary or higher education, which was largely designed to train officials. Nothing more was deemed appropriate for a predominantly peasant society.

  But the industrial boom from 1985 created a demand for people with enough basic skills for factory work. The government responded by increasing education’s share of the national budget from a sixth to a quarter, adding secondary classes to more rural schools, and providing free tuition, lunches, and uniforms to reduce the cost. Over the last quarter of the 20th century, the numbers with secondary or higher education multiplied almost 10 times to 10 million.

  This expansion created a readership for writing of all kinds. By the 1990s, even a small upcountry town had at least one shop with newspapers and magazines out the front, and a stock of several thousand pocketbooks in the back. Because publishing costs were low, these books and magazines were cheap and widely bought.

  In novels and short stories, the social realism of the 1970s continued into the 1980s with a bleaker atmosphere, such as the novels of Chart Kobjitti, including Kham Phiphaksa (The Judgement, 1981). More popular were the melodramas aimed at the rapidly growing middlebrow readership by writers such as Tomayanti and Krisna Asokesin. In their own way, these popular family dramas and historical romances acted as a mirror for the broadening urban middle class to form an identity. In the 1990s, new writers like Prabda Yoon wrote for a young readership, which had grown up in the era of globalization.

  Much larger was the explosion in magazine publishing. Here the most popular genre was ‘real life’ magazines, including sensationalist titles such as Chiwit Tong Su (Life’s Struggle), which featured tales of crime, love, mystery, and personal tragedy; and a feel-good type exemplified by Khu Sang Khu Som (Perfect Couples), which featured tales of success, happiness, and the overcoming of hardship.

  Newspaper publishing surged in the 1970s. Some 177 licences were issued for dailies in 1974 alone. Some, including The Nation in English and Prachathipatai (Democracy) in Thai, were breakaways from established titles and dedicated to a more aggressive and committed style of journalism. Censorship was reimposed in 1976 but eased after a year. Matichon was founded as a ‘quality’ Thai daily in 1977. In 1980, it inaugurated a weekly of news analysis that grew into a compendium of political commentary, short stories, and entertainment, which was widely copied. During the post-1985 boom, Sondhi Limthongkun launched Phujatkan (Manager) as a business daily that combined economic news with politics, and was again copied by several other press houses. In 1991, the press successfully campaigned to revoke Thanin’s Decree 42, which gave government the power to suspend publication or revoke the licences of newspapers. When the generals took power by coup in 1991 and tried to impose censors
hip by threat, several papers defied them. By the 1990s, dailies reached almost two-thirds of urban adults, with around half reading the popular Thai Rath and 6–7 per cent reading the upmarket Matichon. A few provincial centres, such as Chiang Mai, had local papers, usually weekly. But essentially the press was national, issued from Bangkok, and reaching most of urban Thailand and a fifth of people in the countryside.

  All other forms of publishing were overshadowed by the genre of self-help or hao thu (how to) manuals on all subjects but especially business success, health, and social conduct. They provided a new urban society with the guidance that neither formal education nor parents could. Many of the most popular were built around literary works, especially Chinese texts, such as the Art of War, the exploits of the judge Paobunjin, and Sam kok or the Three Kingdoms.

  In their various ways, the daily press, ‘real life’ magazines, melodramatic novels, and hao thu manuals shared the experience, fears, and aspirations of the broadening urban middle class.

  The coming of mass society: mobility and media

  In 1959, the anthropologist Michael Moerman had taken two and a half days by pony to reach his study village in Phayao province. A return trip in 1987 took 90 minutes by road. Four things transformed the Thai village’s relations with the outside world: paved roads, tour buses, television sets, and two-stroke Japanese motorcycles (Figure 22).