The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture
Series under the Cornell East Asia program. The arguments and viewpoints of
this talk belong solely to the speaker. We hope you enjoy.
Thank you very much, Professor McNeal.
It's a great honor for me to be here, be a part of this lecture series and thank
you so much everyone for showing up on this nice Monday afternoon. I'm here to
talk about the nationalizing of the diaspora identity
in the China rising century and over lunch today
Robyn did mention to me that there was some difficulties in translating this
into Chinese and come to think of it I was like oh actually there are quite a
few terms that are used in this context right you have the Hua Qiao, you have the Hua Yi, you have the Hai Wai Hua Ren and
and diaspora itself
actually actually comes from a very different ethnic kind of background
right. It started being used with the case of the Jews so in fact
it is quite a confusing title indeed so I will try to make this as
least confusing as possible. I love this picture. It's going to be the background
of all my slides. It's a picture of the well I mean it's quite amazing this is
in the background there, this is a gigantic dragon building. There's a
museum inside of it. It is called the Museum of the Descendants of the Dragon.
It is an Ethnic Chinese Museum in the province of Suphanburi.
There's a big sign in front of it it's the Shrine of the City Pillars of Suphanburi Province.
So, in fact, the building, the establishment of the Dragon Museum has sort of like dwarfed the city
pillar shrine and I think it says a lot about nationalizing the diaspora identity.
Okay so what exactly do I mean when they say nationalizing the diaspora
identity. Of course here we're talking about the case of the ethnic Chinese
community in Thailand but then even knowing that I'm talking about the
ethnic Chinese community in Thailand could still make it confusing right so
I'm talking about three specific cases that I have seen happening in the past
20 years and I find quite intriguing and I think it says quite a bit about
Chineseness and Chinese identity among the ethnic Chinese in Thailand and I
think it says quite a bit about both the Thai nation and the Chinese nation and
in this case meaning the People's Republic of China. So the first
case is that you have the ethnic Chinese in Thailand especially the ones in
Bangkok becoming increasingly royalist, patriotic, pro-dynastic. If any of you
might have been following the intriguing happenings in Thai politics you would
see that there has been an ongoing struggle between I would say the
Royalist Camp and the Anti-Royalist camp and and we see a large portion of the
ethnic Chinese community becoming more and more ultra-Royalists so in that
sense you might say that there's a move towards nationalizing the
the Chinese diaspora towards the Thai nation so nationalizing
towards the Thai nation. At the same time I see another trend
happening in the past 20 years - the ethnic Chinese overtly identifying with
the People's Republic of China. This is also quite interesting
in that when I was doing my, well I mean when I started to get into
this academic endeavor of researching the overseas Chinese in
Southeast Asia in the end of the 90s you still talked about the ethnic Chinese in
Thailand as dialect groups or hometown associations so they were very localized
identities. You have the Hokkien. You have the Hainan. You have the Teochew
people but increasingly I think since the turn of the century the ethnic
Chinese museums that have popped up many of them throughout the country have been
identifying themselves more closely to the People's Republic of China, more
closely as an extension of the Chinese nation so they don't so everything is in
Mandarin basically and Putonghua even and they present themselves as the link
between Thailand and the People's Republic of China and and this goes
across the board both in the yellow camp or the Royalist Chinese camp and the
Non-Royalist Chinese camp as well. Everyone is trying to align with the
People's Republic of China so this in a way I think is a trend towards
nationalizing towards the Chinese nation right and the last thing is very
interesting especially with the influx of the Chinese tourists into
Thailand in the past decade especially after the blockbuster
film "Lost in Thailand", you have a large influx of mainland
Chinese tourists coming into Thailand and that has become a huge part of the
Thai economy in the recent years and so you see a lot of kind of tourism, the
marketing of Thai culture, Thai identity, Thainess whatever, is skewing more
towards selling to the mainland Chinese tourists and you start
seeing in some cases and we'll talk about one prominent case today as well,
the ethnic Chinese identity actually overtaking the traditional Thai, what we
perceive as traditional Thai identity, that is this Hindu, Buddhist, animist
cultural aspects are being taken over by ethnic Chinese cultural identity for the
for the purpose of tourism and also for the purpose of attracting Chinese
investors in Thailand so in that sense it's kind of like the Thai nation
is somehow signifying itself or self- signification so that it can jump on the
China rising bandwagon so this third case we're not exactly sure
if it is a case of nationalizing towards the Chinese nation or towards
Thai nation, nationalizing for the purposes of the Thai nation in a Chinese
way which is quite confusing but I think it will become clear as I go on so just
to give you some examples, some pictures of what I'm talking about in these three
major points. This Yaowarat Chinatown Heritage Center in Bangkok.
It was founded in 2010. It is, I would say, the most royalist museum in Thailand
and Thailand is a country where most museums are royalist so that's saying a
lot and you could see here is that -that picture shouldn't come out very well
because of the lighting- but basically that's the entrance into the museum. It's
in a very prominent temple at the edge of Chinatown - Wat Traimit - and in front
is a big portrait of King Rama IX - the late King Rama IX,
who just passed away last year and inside basically it tells the
story of the Chinese community in Thailand and its connections with the
with the monarchy from the very first exhibit to the very end, it's basically
the narrative; the narrative is basically that oh, at the end of the 19th century there was
war and unrest and famine and whatever in China and so they came to Thailand
back then known as the Siam and then they because of the unbounded benevolence of
the ruling dynasty they were able to prosper and everything and so it was
they became rich and everything and everything's good.
Thailand is great and the Royal Family has always been kind to the Chinese and
all that so that's the general narrative of this museum extremely extremely
royalist and there's this room towards the end of the exhibition. There are
six rooms altogether so this is room number five and this is very interesting
because it says a lot about how the Chinese in Bangkok Chinatown try to
present themself. This room is called Thai Rom Paparami which
is kind of like underneath the benevolence of or the charismatic
mercy of the King or something I don't know, it's very without translation anyway
it's an oval shape room and at the end of the exit there's an image of King Rama the ninth
- King Bhumibol, the late King and on the two sides there are two
sets of pictures - framed pictures - so on your left here would be pictures of the
Thai Royal Family, high-ranking members, of the Thai Royal Family - the King, the
Queen, the Crown Prince, the Princess and their
state visits to the People's Republic of China and leaders of the People's
Republic of China visiting Thailand would be on the left side of the wall. On
the right side of the wall is our images of high-ranking members of the Royal, the
Thai Royal Family visiting Chinatown, doing different things, joining in the
Chinese New Year festivities and things so basically this is, this is a statement
and I take that the Chinese community in Bangkok are kind of the link between the
royal family and the People's Republic of China so this is, this is how, you know,
in one way it would seem to be very royallist, nationalist in the Thai sense
but in another way it's also expressing itself as an extension of the People's
Republic of China and we see this very clearly in the Yaowarat here in this center,
in this Chinatown Heritage Center. This is my favorite picture, I don't know if it
would be possible but I would like this to be the cover of my book if it ever
sees the light of day so this is from one of the exhibits in the
Yaowarat Chinatown Heritage Center and it's basically a big room and in the
middle there's a model of Yaowarat Road which is basically the center of
Chinatown and it was built in the late 19th century by King Chulalongkorn Rama
the Fifth who is the namesake of my University and then around that model of
Chinatown you have small models of the everyday life of the Chinese in
Chinatown and this is one of them. You can see it's a shrine in the back and then
you have a market, a marketplace, and people are shopping there. I really like
this picture because you can see me in the back with a hat - I'm
taking a picture - but even more interesting
that you can see reflected in the glass back there sitting back there is the
portrait of King Chulalongkorn because at the far side of the the end of the
room there's a whole story about how he decided to build, order the construction
of this modern road through that became the center of Chinatown so this is very
much I think this picture says a lot about the relationship, the patronage of
the Thai royal family towards the ethnic Chinese. Okay, there's another museum. This is
the Udonthani Confucius museum. I think it changed its
name recently into the Udonthani Thai Chinese Cultural Center but when it
started out it was called the Confucius Museum. They say it's also known it's
connected to the Pu-Ya shrine, which is, Pu-Ya is like grandfather grandmother so
essentially it's like the ancestral shrine of the province of Udonthani.
Udonthani is a province in the northeast of Thailand close to the
border with Laos. It is known as the Red Shirt capital of Thailand.
What does Red Shirt capital mean? It means that in the recent struggle, political
struggle that has been going on for the past decade between the
yellow which is essentially the Royalist group and the Red Shirt
which were against military dictatorship the coup and all that.
Some say the Red Shirt support the ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
We can go on and on about this but the point being that Udonthani
a lot of the red shirts are known to come from the north and the northeast and
Udonthani is one of the biggest cities in the northeast and so it's kind of
like the base for the non Royalists ethnic Chinese in Thailand so I visited
this museum and I found that it was very different from the Museum in
Bangkok in that there was very little reference and in fact the first time I
went before the coup there was no reference to the royal family at all
but after the coup they kind of mentioned that, you know, the daughter of
the Crown Prince who is now the king once visited this place but aside from
that there's very little mention of the royal family but they present themselves
very much in connection with the People's Republic of China so they take
pride of course they're all about Confucian filial piety virtues
according to Confucius teachings because of course it's connected to the
provinces' main ancestor shrine and they also pride themselves as
being the sponsor of the first and only full Chinese Orchestra so here you have
pictures on your right side here of the orchestra performing on the Great Wall
of China so this is one of the top ten Chinese orchestras in the world. Before I
visited this museum I have never known that there was a World Championship
Competition of Chinese orchestras, one of the top ten bands were from in fact
from Thailand and this picture in the middle here is when the Chinese
Orchestra went to receive dignitaries from the People's Republic of China so
every time the Prime Minister of the President I think this was
Jiang Zemin visiting Thailand so every time that a prominent Chinese PRC Prime
Minister or PRC president came to visit Thailand they would have to
send this Orchestra from Udon to receive these people
at the airport and perform for them right so once again you see a very clear
alignment with the People's Republic of China okay. I just thought that this was
kind of funny and now everyone thinks that Confucius looks like Chow Yun Fat in
the movie that was recently made right so how this Udonthani
Chinese Museum was set up is that the upper level is the history of the
Chinese community in the Northeast especially in Udonthani and the
important personalities in the community and all that and then the lower level of
the museum is about Confucius so this is the story of the life of Confucius and
the Confucius teachings and like the Confucius Institute and like
the leaders of the Udon Chinese communities visiting important sites
connected to Confucius in mainland China and of course there's a life-size
wax figure here of Confucius who looks like Chow Yun Fat
so this is Udon, very red too in the back.
The last case here, my favorite case, is the Museum of the Descendants of the
Dragon in Suphanburi province and it is connected to the city pillar shrine of
Suphanburi. What is interesting is Suphanburi I think once upon a time was the
heartland of what is supposed to be the Thai identity or Thainess because it
had a very long history of the ancient empire and ancient devotees of the empire
which is a Hindu-Buddhist Empire that ruled over this area of the world
between the 6th and the 13th century and Udonthani is also supposedly
the site of many important events in pre-modern Thai history. Udonthani was
not Udonthani, Suphanburi was supposed to be an important place in the fight
between King Naresuan against the Burmese some 400 years ago.
Udonthani is also the site for the most beloved folktale, Khun Chang Khun Phaen,
which has just been translated by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit into
English so the ideas of and over the 19th and 20th century you have Suphanburi
being figured in the making of the Thai nationalist propaganda from
the reign of King Chulalongkorn in the late nineteenth century all the way up
to the Cold War Era but something has changed and this is actually what the Suphanburi
city pillars look like. There are two statuettes of I believe the Hindu
god Vishnu and it's from the Dvaravati period so very very old and then what
happened, I love this picture,
yes, the city pillars are there. It used to be worshipped by the
local people of Suphanburi and it has been known for quite a long time but
after the establishment of the current dynasty the Chakri dynasty which
established at the end of the 18th century
Suphan Buri was known as one of the unruly provinces that would sometime cause
unrest or would sometimes cause problems to the
central government so for the longest time for the first four reigns there was
a legend that members of the royal family cannot visit this, cannot visit
Suphan Buri Province because they would somehow die or something so it was very
dangerous. It is a bad luck to go and visit Suphan Buri province but
during the reign of King Chulalongkorn who's known as supposedly the
moderniser of the kingdom, his brother, who was Minister of Interior,
Prince Damrong, said, you know, we are modernized now we don't believe in like
the legend so he visited Suphan Buri and he then ordered the construction of
a pavilion so you see the pavilion here is very much in the Thai style and you
know there's a name here, the city pillar shrine of Suphan Buri, and here is a
image connected with the royal family so in this way, in the late 19th
century, the Suphan Buri city pillar shrine was co-opted into part of the
dynastic nationalised narrative but then through the 20th century especially
through the Cold War years, you have the bill out around here so by the time you
get to the 1980s basically the whole thing is covered up in a Chinese, very
Chinese style, so they built the Chinese shrine over the Thai pavilion
here right and even more interesting is that then this museum was built and the
museum basically just dwarfed the city pillar shrine. It is huge.
What is missing here, you see the size of the tweeds here it's like there's like
nineteen rooms or something in here so this is basically the only thing you
see from far away and this has become the most visited tourist attraction
in Suphan Buri so now when you think of Suphan Buri you don't think about
King Naresuan and you don't think about King Chulalongkorn and you don't think about the
Dvaravati Empire anything anymore, you think about the Dragon Museum right so
it has completely become a Chinese province. Okay so we need to talk a bit
about the evolution of the Thai Chinese identity that brought us to this
place with these three bizarre cases that I have just told you about so in a
nutshell Thai Chinese identity 101 yeah and if you want the full complete story
of it you have to pray that my book actually gets published and going by it.
So I'm a historian of the modern era so I don't really know anything much beyond
the 18th century so if we go back to the late 18th to the early 19th century in
fact with the establishment of the current dynasty we see the relationship
that the identity of the Thai Chinese in such a way. So one thing that
you need to know is the corvee labor system and this was very prominent I'm
going to move here because the light is in my eyes. Well anyway the corvee labor
system is kind of the backbone of the Thai feudal system so the idea is that
all adult males from the age of 15 to 70 must
perform civil service, go and perform labor for the State and this had been going on
in fact long before the 18th century and it continued through the new dynasty as
well and it was only abolished in the late 19th century as part of the
modernization efforts and so the thing about the corvee labor system is that
all adult males between the age of 15 to 70 have to go and perform labor for
the state right and how much labor do you have to give to the State? It varies
but at the height of this corvee labor system you have to go every other month
of the year so six months of the year not six months in a row but six every
other month right so what happens here is very interesting in that first
of all the men are not at home a lot and this is partly why traditionally the
Thai family is matrilineal or the male actually marries into to the
bride's family or Thai women have a much more powerful position
within the socio-cultural context compared to, maybe, the Chinese context or
the Korean or the Japanese context, the East Asian context in general. Another
thing is that if you have to perform labor, provide labor for the State every
other month the State needs to know exactly where you are so you're not
encouraged to move around and so they are very much tied to the land and so
what happens is that what kind of profession would you do if you're tied
to the land six months of the year that is, so the
majority of people were peasants, farmers working the land, and in fact most of the
farming, tending to the livestock, taking care of the children
and all that are performed largely by women too because the men would be going out
to war or going out to build, dig a canal or whatever so the men are not
around too much so the only way that you get out, of course, is either if you
become a monk or if you join the nobility, become a civil servant of some
sort so this makes for a very interesting social structure in that you
have the peasants you have the the working class and then you have the
nobility and the question is who perform services, who are the middle class, who
are the trading, the merchant class people and this is where the Chinese
came in. This is why the Chinese are so important in the Thai economy for a very
long time before the Chinese come in as someone in
between in the sense that they are not considered foreigners like the Europeans
or the Americans or the Japanese even. When they come to trade with
Thailand they're limited to the port cities they could not go inland. The
Chinese are not considered foreign in that sense. They can travel around in
land. They can marry Thai women and whatever just like Thai people but they
are not included in the corvee labor system so they are not considered native
so they don't have to perform corvee labor at the same time they are not
considered foreign so they can travel around so they became the main merchant
class in the kingdom for a long time and with this. Also another important thing
was that Thailand back then known as a Siam was engaged in the tribute trade to
China and that was the most by far the most important trade that the
kingdom was involved in and in order to conduct this trade effectively
it was for a long time that the court would use ethnic Chinese agents to
facilitate this trade of China so they had very close connections with the
ruling dynasty as trade agents in the tribute trade to China. They were also
employed as tax farmers. This is a system that is very widely practiced throughout
Southeast Asia especially once the colonial period began so the
Chinese from very early on had a very close relationship with the ruling
class and then when you get to the colonial period so 19th century to the
early 20th century something very interesting happened in Thailand and
this is something that people keep talking about when they talk about
Thailand or when they talk about colonial Southeast Asia whatever you
might have heard a lot of Thai historians are very hung up with the
fact that like, "oh Thailand was never colonized by the West" blah blah right and
everyone else in Southeast Asia was colonized by the West so we're so cool.
We did not have the colonial period and all that so what actually happened?
What actually happened was that from my point of view Thailand was not
completely colonized by the West because the Thai ruling class, the monarchy,
established a system that marked the structure of the colonial state. In
another sense, to sum it up,
it's basically that the King disguised the kingdom into a colony and the king
acted as a colonial officer so the basically the colonizers did not need to
colonize Siam because the ruling class of Siam was already acting as
colonial officers already and you would see what I mean by this, right? You
see here extraterritoriality. So what what happened during the colonial period
was that one of the conditions that was posed to all these different Asian
kingdoms - the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, everyone in Southeast Asia,
the beginning before being colonized is that you have these unfair treaties that
demand extraterritorial rights for the colonial subjects and
that means that if colonial subjects have run-ins with law they do not have
to be subject to the legal system of those local, of the local legal system so
they would be tried in the Consulate
Court instead. They would be tried by the law of the colonizers, of the colonial
empires. So the same thing happened to Siam, or Thailand as well. In 1855
the king ratified the Bowring treaty and started the system of
extraterritoriality in Thailand. The interesting thing is that you have a
large number of colonial subjects in Siam and a lot of them were not
Europeans. A lot of them were ethnic Chinese so what happens is that a lot of
ethnic Chinese especially the richest one
the tycoons, the most influential one in the economy, would find ways of being
registered as colonial subjects. How do they do this? They may say, oh I come from
some treaty ports in South China or my father was actually
born in British Malaya or I actually came through French Indochina
or whatever before I came to Thailand or I'm connected someway to people
who are colonial subjects and also if they're working for foreign companies
it's also beneficial for the foreign companies to try and get their employees
registered as colonial subjects because then they are basically above the
Thai law right and what happens is that a large number of the richest ethnic
Chinese in Siam at the time got themselves registered as colonial
subjects especially colonial subjects of Britain and France at a time with the
largest groups and this is where it becomes interesting. When a lot of
mainstream Thai historians talk about extraterritoriality they talk
about it as a disadvantage as a negative thing as, you know, the Kingdom losing
parts of its sovereignty right but in fact if you look at the
situation here closely you would see that extraterritoriality
was actually very useful for sustaining the power of the Thai ruling
class. Why? Because as everyone likes to say, Thailand or Siam was never
colonized by the West so everyone else, all the neighbors of Siam, were a part of
an empire so this is the only non-empire state in the
whole Southeast Asia so Siam was competing in a way in an economy with
other players who are part of larger empires right the Dutch East Indies, the
French Indochina, British Malaya, British India and so in fact the only way to
remain competitive is to try and mimic that system and one of the ways that
the ruling class did was to work through ethnic Chinese trade agents and to
use the ethnic Chinese merchants and businessmen and entrepreneurs to drive
the Siamese economy so that it's competitive within a region taken over
by European empires. Now you would ask what is in it for the Chinese. Why do
they need to prop up the Thai economy?
Being a colonial subject in Siam or Thailand in the late 19th century to the
early 20th century is the best place to be in Southeast Asia. Why is it the
best place to be? Because if you're a colonial subject in Siam and you get
into trouble with the government you were above the law right and then you
may say, well, isn't it the same in every other country? The point is that because
Siam was not fully colonized so the colonial powers don't have full control
over Siam either so I'll give you an example of one of the cases that
happened in the late 19th century. So there was this Chinese the Chinese merchant
coming in trading from Yunnan to the north of Siam at the time and
he ran into trouble with the Thai police somewhere in northern Thailand and he
said I'm a British colonial subject so the Thai
police contacted the British Consulate in Bangkok and said so there's this guy
we've tried to arrest him but he said he was a British colonial subject, is he a
colonial subject and the British Consulate in Bangkok would say hmmm
he's not signed up with us as a British colonial subject but he might have
signed up in Yangon or in British Malaya or in somewhere else so we need to check
with them and this is an age before email right so you can imagine right by
the time the British Consulate in Bangkok has contacted the Consulate in, I
mean, the British authorities in Yangon, the British authorities in Penang, the
British authorities in wherever, that guy would have been long gone right? So in a
sense being a colonial subject in Siam allows you to be even freer than
being colonial subjects in actual colonies like Malaya or Indochina right?
So it's easier to do business in many ways if you're Chinese
and you're based in Siam. Another thing is that the ruling class,
the royal family, especially, has had a tradition of giving special, what,
providing the Chinese entrepreneurs with contracts, with royal titles, having
a very cordial relationship between the the Chinese business community and the
ruling class. You see, another very clear example is that there was a
case where the British were building a railroad from the north
of Burma down to the port city and were
trying to attract all the traders in the north to trade in British Burma
for the reason that if you trade in British Burma and your goods can be
transported by train down to the port city and it could go beyond British
Burma. Around the same time King Chulalongkorn Rama V decided to invest
in railroads from Chiang Mai - the northern province of Chiang Mai - to
Bangkok and so with the same proposal is that if you trade in Chiang Mai
your goods can also be transported down to the coast and be sent
elsewhere as well. A very interesting thing happened in that most of the other
ethnic traders in Chiang Mai especially the Indians, the various
Muslim groups, a lot of them switch over to trade in British Burma instead. The
only one group that remain very firmly in Chiang Mai were the Chinese merchants
and this was, I think, because of this special position with extraterritorial
rights and also this special relationship with a Thai ruling class as
well. And another important thing is that so the Chinese did perform
for the Thai Court as agents in the colonial trade during this period as
well. Another important thing that people talk about a lot in terms of the
relationship between the Chinese and the Thai Royal Family or the Thai Dynasty,
the current dynasty, and this is probably why my book manuscript
has been rejected three times is that the first thing,
you know people who know anything about the Chinese in Thailand, the first thing
they think of when you say that the Thai royal family and the ethnic Chinese, they
think of King Rama the Sixth Vajiravudh who published an article called the
Jews of the Orient in the daily newspaper in 1914 and comparing the
Chinese problem in Siam to the Jewish problem in Europe and so
with that publication, everyone's like, the Thai Royal Family hates the Chinese.
They don't get along there you know, anti-Chinese and everything so that's,
that's kind of like the bottom line so once when I try to say that
there's a relationship otherwise people are like, did you know Vajiravudh hated
the Chinese, he published "Jews of the Orient" in 1914. True, but something
about Vajiravudh who was supposed to be kind of the founder of this
Royalist nationalism in Thailand is that if you look closely to the
structure of Royalist nationalism that Vajiravudh established in the early
19th, in the early 20th century in the 1910s is that it's actually a
kind of nation-building project that is designed to include the ethnic Chinese.
Why do I say this? You have to imagine if you were a Siamese King in
1910 where you're the total population was less than ten million according to
both research material from the Republic of China and the Japanese in the 1930s
there were supposed to be ethnic Chinese in Siam in the 1930s between 3 and 3.5
million so you can imagine during Vajiravudh's reign up to one-third of
the total population are ethnic Chinese and the richest and most influential
among them are signed up as colonial subjects so if you want to have
a nation you cannot have a territorial nation you have to have some form of the
nation that would allow these Chinese to keep their money in Siam and keep
investing in Siam so what is the easiest way to be part of the nation-building
project in this case? To donate to the King's projects, to express loyalty
towards the monarch and that was how Vajiravudh did so. Yes he published "Jews
of the Orient" but I think he is the monarch of the Chakri dynasty
there has been up to today, 10, he's number six, he's the one,
he's one of the ones that received the most donations from the Chinese
community. A lot of his major projects were done solely on Chinese donations so
what I'm saying is that "Jews of the Orient" in a way was a challenge. He was
saying that you are not loyal to the Thai crown, you are not patriotic because
you send all your money back to China you don't support the local economy you
don't support the government's project and whatever and then what happens after
that? These big Chinese business people buy aircrafts for the King's new Air
Force. They donate money to buy a warship. They donate new guns for the King's Royal
Wild Tiger Corps and all that so this is the way in which the easiest way to show
that you are a nationalist, a Royalist nationalist is to pay money so and that
actually worked out quite well so you have this kind of, this relationship
between the ruling class and the capitalist class that dates back
quite for quite a long time. Yes, so then you have a brief period of a very
interesting change. There was a revolution in 1932 which ended the
absolute monarchy and established a constitutional monarchy and the
Revolutionary Party was known as the People's Party. The first thing,
one of the first achievements of the People's Party is government was to
negotiate the abolition of extraterritoriality in 1938. So this was
the first time that it was possible to actually have a territorial nation so
during this time, the government was basically forcing the Chinese to
either be Chinese or be Thai because you can no longer be a colonial subject
and they were against the imperialists so unlike the absolute monarchy
before they were not working with the the European imperialist power and
this is why, I would say, this is why when the Second World War arrived in Thailand
the government sided with the Japanese because the Japanese came with this
anti-European imperialist propaganda right this Pan-Asia is like liberating
the Asians from the imperialists right so they sided with the Japanese
and so the relationship between the state and the ethnic Chinese during this
point in time was very problematic and as we know, unfortunately, well I don't
know, fortunately for a lot of people but also unfortunately for a lot of people
that the Japanese were defeated and what happened was that during the Second
World War, as soon as the Revolutionary Government declared that they would be
on the side of the Japanese, the Royalist faction set up the Free Thai Movement
and said we are on the side of the Allied powers so what happened was after
the Second World War you have the return of the Royalist nation-state and the
Royalist faction into the Thai political scene and throughout the Cold War you
have a series of military dictatorships that was supported by the Anti-Communist
US in Thailand and so the Chinese elite switched from
being the court agent to being the agents of the imperialist powers to in
the Cold War period being the business agents of the monarchist and militarist
ruling class right? Okay, I will finish in five minutes so this is a very
interesting example. This is Mr. Banharn Silpa-acha
who was the 21st Prime Minister of Thailand. He primarily served for
only one year. He is interesting because for several
reasons. First of all he is very clearly Chinese and he came up as a very, he became
a very rich businessman through his connections with the military and he got
contracts from the military government and eventually in one of the []
governments he was appointed senator and from the 1980s onwards he started
entering elections and becoming a mainstay of Suphan Buri MP right and
and eventually in 1995 he was elected prime minister so one of the
rare elected prime ministers in Thailand these days and the interesting thing was
that after only one year he was voted out. There was this like non-confidence
vote against Banharn Silpa-acha for many reasons but one of the very sensational
stories was that he was accused of not having the basic qualities that he could
be Prime Minister because there was a question whether or
not his father was a Thai citizen. His father might have been Chinese and in
the end it proved to be a false accusation but that was a one of the
biggest part of the vote of non-confidence at the time and what
is interesting about this guy is that he probably was elected so many times.
One thing that contributed to his political success was his Chinese
identity and he, even after facing this political disaster of being accused of
not being really Thai, when he got out of, when his term ended
prematurely in 1996, he started on the project of building this Museum of the
Descendants of the Dragon so he even continued to, like, express overtly his
chineseness right and he started from 1996 and the museum was only completed
and opened in 2008 and he just passed away in April last year and it was, it
was amazing when you look at his obituary in everything that is coming
out in the newspaper about him in 2016, it was awesome to be Chinese in 2016.
No one was saying that oh you horrible person your father might not have been
Thai you should not be Prime Minister whatever. 2016 it was the popular thing
to be Chinese right so a huge change right. So you see the post-war
evolution, the opening up of the People's Republic of China, and down here you have
a picture of Deng Xiaoping's visit to Thailand in 1978. 1978 was the first
Southeast Asian tour of Deng Xiaoping after the opening up of the People's
Republic of China. People like to talk about him seeing Lee Kuan Yew but in
fact the first person he visited was the king of Thailand, before Lee Kuan Yew. He
was also invited to join the Ordination of the then Crown Prince who was the
current King and and there's a reason for that
because in fact at least up to the Second World War the largest number of ethnic
Chinese are, in the world, in Southeast Asia. The largest number of ethnic
Chinese in Southeast Asia was in Thailand. This is according to Chinese
and Japanese sources so Thailand has for a long long long long time has
been a very important backyard for people from the Mainland. At the same
time you have, after that, following that, you have the Chinese starting to
invest in mega projects in the Greater Mekong sub-region, in Laos, Cambodia,
Myanmar and in Vietnam and then recently, more recently you have the One Belt One
Road Initiative which also includes a bit of Southeast Asia, mainland Southeast
Asia and you have the film "Lost in Thailand" which has caused the enormous
influx of mainland Chinese tourists to Thailand so what has changed
since? The first thing is that back in the days the only way to make it big as
a Chinese businessman is to have connection or alliance with the
central government, with a court or with the military government right?
But in the 21st century you don't need that anymore, the example, the clear
example is the museum in Udon Thani in that if you can tap into Chinese
investments in the Greater Mekong sub-region, if you can tap into the
capital of the Chinese tourists, of Chinese investors, you don't need
approval from the court in Bangkok you don't need to build that connection at
all, you can even be against the court and you can still make it big in
business if you can tap into PRC capital. Another interesting thing is that
everyone is frantically shifting alliances. They're shifting alliances with
the People's Republic of China. You see, the court. The court actually was the
first one to shift, as I said, 1978, Deng Xiaoping met with
the King. 1980, Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn started
learning Mandarin so she is actually very much ahead of the game. The military
also followed suit in their relationship with the People's Republic of China
especially in the recent military government. Royalists'
businesses, the businesses that have ties with the dynasty, are also very much
gravitating towards China and even the Anti-Royalists businesses are also
trying to tap into PRC capital. You have very clearly the transformation of
ethnic Chinese identity in Thailand from a localized dialect based identity to a
nationalized, an extension of the Chinese nation, of the People's Republic of China.
People are not, the later generation myself included, of ethnic
Chinese, do not speak dialect. It's almost impossible to
learn dialect in Thailand but it's very easy to to learn Mandarin especially Putonghua.
Thailand has the largest number of Confucius Institutes in
Southeast Asia and in Asia. There're like fourteen or sixteen or something.
Compared to two in Indonesia and one in Laos so we have a lot a lot a lot right.
And mainland Chinese tourists now are holding up more than half the sky of the
Thai economy so rapid signification of two-identity for economic purposes so
it's not good enough to be Thai you know for tourism you have to be Thai in a way
that mainland Chinese tourists would want to buy your stuff, so it has to be
catered towards mainland Chinese tourists as well, so you see this very
interesting transformation of the Chinese diaspora identity in
Thailand vis-a-vis politics with mainland China. I'm sure I left out a lot
of things but for now thank you very much and I look forward to questions.