THE SEISMIC SHIFTS BEHIND THE COUP IN THAILAND

Thailand has been in crisis since an
armed forces coup overthrew prime
minister Thaksin Shinawatra in
September 2006, ultimately forcing
him into exile. Although his opponents used
fair means and foul to keep various
incarnations of Thaksin’s party out of
power, his sister Yingluck Shinawatra
became Thailand’s first female prime
minister following a resounding electoral
victory for Thaksin’s Pheu Thai (For Thai)
party in 2011.
But Yingluck’s government started to unravel
in 2013 when it attempted a mass amnesty for
those charged with corruption or other
crimes. It was clear the amnesty was designed
to allow Thaksin to return from exile.
Opposition to the government surged, further
fuelled by the failure of a populist rice-
subsidy scheme that not only provided
opportunities for corruption but also proved
so costly that the government couldn’t honour
its payments. Yingluck faces corruption
charges over the scheme.
On 7 May, the Constitutional Court removed
Yingluck office for her role in trying to install
the brother of Thaksin’s former wife as police
chief. She pleaded, disingenuously, that he
was no longer family. The divorce was a
political convenience, of course, and
Yingluck’s manoeuvre shows just how
ingrained oligarchic politics is in Thailand.
In the end, the evolving crisis led to another
coup on 22 May. Intriguingly, it has met with
much less opposition than anyone expected.
o understand the crisis in Thai politics,
it’s important to examine the
momentous changes Thai society has
undergone in recent decades. If certain
key institutions, such as the monarchy, have
not yet been transformed, then they are about
to be. Old relationships have been
destabilised; new ones are not yet in place. It
is this setting – the perfect opening for a
populist demagogue like Thaksin – that
explains much more about contemporary
Thailand than the grossly simplified image of
a struggle between the “rural poor” and the
urban middle-class and elites.
I have been watching events unfold from
neighbouring Laos, a perfect observation
point. Thailand’s northeast region, just across
the border, accounts for 31 per cent of the
total population. Commonly called Isan (and
its people, Khon Isan), the region is mostly
ethnic Lao, and has been a major base of
support for Thaksin. According to
anthropologist Charles Keyes, the region’s
ethno-regional identity and solidarity has
made the local people into a formidable
political force. But, as Keyes also shows, Isan
has been transformed out of sight since he
first visited fifty years ago.
When Keyes and his wife Jane went to central
Isan in 1963–64 it was still the poorest region
in Thailand. Self-sufficient peasants battled
with irregular rainfall and poor soils to make
ends meet. The local geography conspired
against commercial agriculture, and so men
had begun heading to Bangkok for work in
construction or other menial jobs, especially
during the dry season. When Thailand
became a playground for US troops on leave
from the war in Vietnam, women headed to
the urban bars and brothels for work.
American aid drove roads through the region
and sped up the circulation of people between
city and countryside. Drawn out of their rural
isolation, the migrants came into contact with
others like themselves from across Isan,
fomenting an ethno-regional sentiment.
Together, they became aware of the wealth
differences between Isan and Bangkok.
For residents of Bangkok, many of whom were
of Sino-Thai descent, these dark, short-
statured people in simple clothing were ban
nok, “country bumpkins” whose dialect was
crude to their ears. When TV came along they
became the fall guys in Thai comedies, and in
everyday life they had to suffer the contempt
of those above them.
Keyes describes how the people of this region
became Thai through an expansion of the
national bureaucracy, the centralising of the
Buddhist sangha, and especially – since the
1930s – schools that educated both boys and
girls. They learned to use the central Thai
language and its various polite forms and,
especially from the 1950s on, they learned to
love the Thai king, Bhumiphol Adulyadej.
Essentially, it was good old-fashioned nation
building, and similar processes occurred for
every region, including Bangkok, where the
Chinese, for instance, needed to be turned
into Thais.
Migration in search of work, especially
overseas, transformed the lives of Isan’s
peasants to the point where they became rural
entrepreneurs. “By the early twenty-first
century,” writes Keyes, “non-agricultural
work had become the most significant source
of cash income for villagers. The money
villagers brought back from urban or overseas
work was increasingly invested not in
agriculture but in small enterprises such as
convenience stores, repair shops, and food
stalls as well as rice mills.” Importantly, it
was also used to pay for higher education for
children, of whom there were fewer now that
women were embracing birth control.
Thaksin’s power base is in the north, around
Chiang Mai, where the conditions suited full-
scale commercial farming. This, too, caused
migration from the countryside to the city
and upward mobility through education. The
north’s ethno-regional identity is strong –
they are known as Khon Muang – but because
their aristocracy had been seamlessly
absorbed by the Siamese state they are not
looked down on like the people of Isan.
Indeed, Thai soap operas are more likely to
romanticise old northern aristocratic life and
emulate its speech forms.
n one sense, what had been forming in
the Thai countryside by the time of
Thaksin’s rise in the late 1990s was a
rural entrepreneurial class determined to
better their lives and sweep away any
bureaucratic obstacles. Thaksin the mega-
entrepreneur played to this audience
perfectly, and his million-baht-per-village
loan scheme, alongside cheap universal
healthcare, won him unwavering support. The
majority of activists in the Red Shirt
movement are in their forties or older –
exactly the group that has made the transition
from scarcity to having tasted the good life.
Big, shiny cars are now ubiquitous on Isan’s
highways; as one Red Shirt follower said, “We
are not going back to riding motorcycles.”
This doesn’t quite fit with journalistic clichés
about the “rural poor.” In the same way,
bland assertions about the “Bangkok middle-
class” blur the changing urban landscape.
As its skyline shows, Bangkok has been
remade since 1980 by dramatic economic
growth. The city’s workforce has diversified
and middle-class occupations have grown
steeply. Labour shed by agriculture has
flowed into manufacturing, where the
workforce grew from 14 per cent of the total
in 1990 to 20 per cent in 2008. But white-
collar work grew even faster – from one-in-
five employees to almost one-in-three – and
within its ranks professionals and senior
white-collar workers grew fastest.
Even in Keyes’s rural village, 17 per cent of
children in 2005 had gone on from high
school to vocational colleges or (in 4 per cent
of cases) to university, and 22 per cent had
finished high school. Because most of them
sought white-collar jobs, often in the capital,
migrants played an important role in the
growth of the middle class in Bangkok. Many
are upwardly mobile, socially and culturally,
and have learned to speak flawless central
Thai. They dress for and aspire to an affluent
urban lifestyle. An important indicator of the
dislocations involved in cultural change,
however, is the fact that the Bangkok
metropolitan area has one of the highest non-
marriage rates for women in their twenties
and thirties of any city in Southeast Asia.
For these upwardly mobile new members of
the middle class, the plebeian style adopted by
the Red Shirts is exactly what they are
running away from. Of course, many of them
aren’t politically active, but others have
joined the anti-Thaksin forces because they
agree with the middle-class critique of the
government corruption epitomised by the
Thaksin years. No doubt these migrants are
part of the reason why the Thai press speaks
of bitter divisions in families over politics.
Over this same period, Thailand’s elite has
also changed radically. The Asian financial
crisis of 1997 hit Thailand especially hard,
sending many old business families to the
wall. The boom years had been built on major
inflows of foreign investment and a globalised
economy. Close relations with the Thai state
had once provided local capitalists with very
comfortable incomes, but now globalisation
had destabilised the cosy arrangements. In
fact, Thaksin’s wealth in the
telecommunications sector had initially been
built on a deal that gave him a monopoly. Yet
he was part of a new breed of Thai capitalists
who thought globally and aimed to take over
the government and run the state as if it was
a business. As Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris
Baker write in their superb biography,
“Thaksin’s project was built around a fatal
confusion – between business and politics,
country and company, Shin Corp and
Thailand. Throughout his career, politics and
profit-making were entwined around one
another like a pair of copulating snakes.”
After the election of his Thai Rak Thai (Thai
Love Thai) party in January 2001, Thaksin’s
already rich business and family network
went into a feeding frenzy.
The monarchy, headed by enigmatic King
Bhumiphol Adulyadej, is also about to change
irreversibly. A conservative who believes in
rule by righteous individuals, the king has
done deals with military dictators to
strengthen the monarchy but has never been
a thug himself. His preference, as much as
one can discern it, is for a form of guided
democracy. He has been an enormously
popular and respected figure for many
decades. But he became physically enfeebled
just as the political turmoil began, and the
Queen has since been crippled by a stroke,
and so now the royal couple are marionettes
of the Privy Council.
The heir, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, has
none of his father’s political talent or
charisma. He is believed to have had dealings
with Thaksin, although it is unclear what these
amount to. In late November last year,
according to the Economist, “the King signed a
decree mandating that all decisions by the
powerful defence council were subject to veto
by the Crown Prince,” but whether
Vajiralongkorn really wields this power is
moot. With the passing of King Bhumiphol,
the personalised networks that have been
spun around him for so long will unravel and
Vajiralongkorn will find himself presiding
over a weakened monarchy. It will be a big
blow for conservatives.