Thailand

ATLANTIC

February 1954

on the World today

ANY man in the sired in Bangkok will tell you that government officials are dishonest, that cabinet ministers are making fortunes in the government rice monopoly, that the police force is supported by the sale of the opium it seizes, and that top government officials are busily banking their profits outside the country, probably in South America. All these rumors seem to have a basis in fact. But, surprisingly enough, practically nobody cares. In the Thai phrase, “Mai pen rai—it doesn’t matter.”

With the exception of a small intelligentsia in Bangkok, the Siamese are indifferent to politics and to the functioning or malfunctioning of their government. They are satisfied with the status quo. By Western standards the bulk of the people are poor indeed, but by the debased standards of Southeast Asia they are rich. Thailand is a rice-surplus area, and everyone has enough to fill his belly. There is, for the moment, no population pressure to breed discontent. In most parts of the country any ambitious farmer can find new land.

Alone among the people of Southeast Asia, the Siamese have never known the rule of Western imperialists. As a result, they have had no reason to develop a hypernationalism. They have had, in fact, no stimulus to turn them to politics. They leave the business of government to the governors. It is symptomatic that newspapers outside Bangkok print practically no national political news. It is not a question of censorship. Their readers simply are not interested.

The Government Party of Prime Minister Phibun (pronounced Pee-boon) Songgram has been firmly in the saddle since 1951. Unquestionably his government is a dictatorship, and Thailand is a police state. But because the people are so complacent, the ruling clique does not have to be aggressively dictatorial. It is composed, to resurrect tin old phrase, of “genial fascists.”

Not a single coup has livened the Thai scene for more than two years. The police cracked down last summer on what they claimed was a Communist conspiracy. The accused conspirators, some of whom were members of the Government Party, have not yet been brought to trial. At a preliminary hearing one of them emerged from prison long enough to tell the judge how he had been tortured by police to get a confession of Marxist leanings. His story was quickly hushed and the trial indefinitely postponed.

Although there is no chance of a real upheaval, a good palace revolution may happen any time. The showdown, when it comes, will be between the army and the police. The director-general of the police is General Phao Sriyanondh. The real commander of the army is the deputy minister of defense, General Sarit Dhanaratjatu. They are the two most powerful men in Thailand today, despite the reputation of Prime Minister Phibun as a strong mail.

Phao’s police force numbers about 40,000 men. It is equipped with such unusual police weapons as tanks and helicopters, and it includes a force of American-trained police paratroops. Sarit’s army is about the same size, mostly infantry.

Phibun’s balancing art

Phibun stays in power by a delicate balancing act, at which he is proving himself, in the best Thai tradition, extremely adept. How long he can continue is anybody’s guess. It is twenty-two years since he came to power for the first time, in a coup which ended the world’s last absolute monarchy. He was one of the young, European-trained army officers who decided Thailand needed a modern form of government, Since 1931 he has been in and out of power, alternating for the most part with his chief rival, Pridi Pranomyong.

During World War II, Phibun was the pro-Japanese prime minister and Pridi headed the proAmerican “Free Thai Movement ” inside the country. Naturally in 1940 and 1947 Pridi was riding high, but in 1948 Phibun drove him from power. Since the early thirties Phibun had been accusing his opponent of Communism, and Pridi finally obliged him by disappearing mysteriously into Red China.

Most observers thought he would pop up again in the new Free Thai Movement which the Chinese Communists organized last spring when the Viet. Minh attacked Laos. Instead the Reds chose as “president" a disgruntled relative of the King of Laos. They announced the Communist Free Thai area to contain Thailand, Laos, the Shan States of Burma, and parts of Yunnan Province in China, all inhabited by the descendants of the original Thai tribes. When the Viet Minh moved across Laos again at Christmas time, Bangkok declared a state of emergency in the nine provinces facing IndoChina and rushed troops to the border.

Bumper rice crop

For the first time since 1945, Thailand faces an economic crisis. Since the end of the war Siamese rice has found a ready market all over hungry Asia, but now there seems to be more than enough rice in the world. India, until this year a major purchaser, has harvested a bumper crop. The United States has suddenly become an important exporter. Malaya and Indonesia are cutting back on their imports.

Even in November, Thailand’s storage facilities were bulging. The real problem came in January when the 1953 crop was fully harvested. The government moved to cut the drain on foreign exchange by declaring strict import controls. Only the typhoon that destroyed so much of Japan’s rice in the fields last summer has saved Thailand from a really overwhelming surplus.

All through the post-war years, however, there has been a tremendous spread between the rate which the government rice monopoly paid to the farmers and the price it charged for the commodity on the overseas exchange. Thailand’s conspicuous prosperity has been limited to the traders and politicians in Bangkok. It hasn’t really filtered down to the farms. By the same token a depression will hit Bangkok hard. The farmers will lose what little cash they have earned from the sale of their surplus rice, but they will still have enough to eat.

The fine art of diplomacy

In their successful effort to remain free during two imperialist centuries, the rulers of Thailand developed the art of diplomacy to a fine point. While England, France, and Holland were gobbling up her neighbors, Thailand learned how best to play one power against another in order to stay on the winning side. During World War II, into which the Siamese entered as allies of the conquering Japanese and from which they emerged with a reputation for underground friendliness to the victorious United Nations, the Thai government once again demonstrated its adeptness at shifting with the winds of fortune.

The current rulers of Thailand are loud in their proclamations of loyalty to the cause of democracy. The police quickly clap into jail anyone who breathes a word of serious dissent. The army announces itself as ready to light if the Communists attack from Indo-China or China.

The prosperous Chinese minority

The Chinese constitute nearly one fifth of the 19 million people in the country. Like all overseas Chinese, those in Thailand have found ways to keep in touch with events on “the mainland.” In the last year there has been a decided swing away from Communism and toward the Nationalists.

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce, dominated until last summer by Communist sympathizers, has been reorganized into a firm, Kuomintang-oriented group. Both the Chamber and the Chinese Legation staged extremely successful parties last fall in honor of Double Tenth, the October 10 birthday of the Chinese Republic. There were no celebrations on October 1, the Red Chinese holiday, because no supporter of Mao Tse-tung, regardless of how loyal, would dare to brave the wrath of Phao’s police.

In Thailand, probably more than in any of the other Southeast Asian countries in which the Chinese form a prosperous minority, there is antiChinese prejudice. The Chinese are discriminated against by all sorts of laws. A Chinese merchant not only must pay a special tax as an alien resident, but he cannot, except under very unusual circumstances, take out citizenship papers. For printing his name in Chinese characters over the door to his shop he pays another tax. A Chinese workman is strictly prohibited from entering certain trades; for instance, he cannot be a barber.

Certainly if there were a group ripe for Communism because of its resentment of the status quo, it would be the Chinese. Their failure to espouse the cause of the new China is a measure of the failure of Mao’s regime to make headway in Thailand.

Mission center

Because the country is so peaceful and the government so coöperative, Thailand is a haven for all the diverse agencies that want, for whatever reason, to raise the standard of living of Asia. The groups with the longest history of eleemosynary work among the Siamese are the missionaries, who first arrived a century ago. Nearly fifty years ago the Protestant churches split up Southeast Asia on a sort of cartel system, and Thailand fell to the Presbyterians. They have seventeen schools, scattered around the country, plus almost as many hospitals and one leprosarium, in the leprosyprone north.

But the Presbyterians no longer have a monopoly. The Seventh-Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses — believers in free religious competition — have moved in. The Adventists run the most modern hospital in Bangkok, patronized for the most part by Americans and Chinese. The Witnesses distribute the Watchtower in the Thai language.

In the last few years the ranks of missionaries have been increased by the overflow of mission groups ousted from China, looking for “temporary fields of activity. In Bangkok, Roman Catholic orders also have several excellent schools. The number of converts to all these sects has been few, but three generations of Siamese have come to respect the Christians for their medical and educational work.

American aid

The United States government has a thriving special technical and economic mission in Bangkok. Under the successive initials of EGA, MSA, and FOA, the mission has aided Thailand to the tune of $22.4 million since 1950. The budget for the current fiscal year is $5 million. The major efforts have been in such basic fields as public health and sanitation, education, and agriculture. The mission has tried, by pilot projects in, say, welldigging or seed selection, to teach the Thai government how to proceed on its own.

A second form of official American aid to Thailand is the Fulbright exchange teacher program, Sixteen Americans are now teaching in Thai schools and universities. Most of them are working with future teachers, who will be expected to soak up American educational methods without making the expensive trip abroad.

But missionaries and American aid missions have become common phenomena around the world. Peculiar to Bangkok is the concentration of United Nations agencies doing their bit to raise living standards. Bangkok is the headquarters of the Economic Council for Asia and the Far East. It is the Asian headquarters for the United Nations Children’s Fund and for the World Health Organization. UNESCO has a program with the education department of the Thai government. The World Bank is behind a major development scheme involving the irrigation of a complete new area for ricelands. The FAO has programs for all Thai crops from rubber to rice.

The old ways linger

Because so many agencies have chosen Thailand as the scene of their endeavors, the country is an interesting study in the results of aid to Asia. It is, in effect, a microcosm of the Orient in its reaction to the new Western spirit of uplift. Unfortunately, aid to Asia does not pay off in any easy and sure manner. The wisest of experts with the best of intentions cannot change overnight ways of life that people have followed for centuries. Sometimes the results of the projects are extremely discouraging.

The Presbyterian missionaries, for instance, feel that the time has come to turn over their hospitals to trained Thai doctors and technicians. But wherever they have done so, the standards of the institutions have slipped. In the northern city of Chieng Mai, Dr. Boon Chom Ariwongee, American-educated head of the McCormick Hospital, is one leading young Thai who realizes this development. No matter how hard he works, he cannot keep his laboratory technicians, his nurses, and his staff doctors up to the mark that used to be set for them by American directors. He believes the Thai people, accustomed to relying on Westerners and to following their lead, have not yet developed a faith in their own educated classes.

In most of the Presbyterian mission schools there is still at least one American teacher. Neither that teacher nor any visiting American supervisors can convince the Thai teachers to adopt American educational methods. They cling to their teaching by rote. Nevertheless, each Thai principal insists on maintaining an American on the staff simply for the prestige it gives the school.

World Health Organization teams started an anti-malaria drive in 1950 by thoroughly spraying with DDT the walls of all dwellings in the worst disease areas. UN representatives showed Thai workers how the spraying should be done. The annual repetition of spraying is now handled by the Thai government. Workers no longer spray behind furniture or in difficult corners. They sometimes carelessly skip whole houses. The net effect of their slipshod methods is to cancel the good of the campaign.

Of course, some of the applications of Western science to Thailand’s problems are bound to show long-range results. American methods of seed selection cannot help increasing Siamese rice production as long as the Americans stay around to supervise the program. FAO’s introduction of bud-grafted rubber trees will be a boon to the small rubber farmers of the south without their lifting a finger to change their own habits.

But it is apparent that aiding Thailand, or any of the countries of Asia, to change its ways is going to involve a long pull. If the West wants to produce permanent results, it will have to continue its programs of advice, assistance, and education for a good many years. Without steady support and reinforcement, Thailand’s thin veneer of modern Western ways would soon crumble.