Episode 119: The Unconquered Kingdom, One More Time

To all the listeners of this podcast, I want to thank you for your patience. I actually started to record this in the third week of January (there is a reference to January early in the episode), but the work was interrupted more than once, for more than a day each time. Now at last, it is finished and good to go. This time we finish the series of episodes on recent Southeast Asian history, by looking at events in Thailand, from 2001 to the present. At the end I tell you about a new icon to give special recognition to the show’s donors, and remind you that the next episode will feature your questions. February is a short month, so if you have any questions, send them to me today!

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/83872545/episode-119-the-unconquered-kingdom-one-more-time/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Gabriel S., Alexei K., Donn C., Walter H., and Brian T. All of them have made donations to the podcast since the last episode came out. Alexei also donated in 2020, so he now qualifies to receive the coveted water buffalo icon, on the Podcast Hall of Fame Page. Last time, I invited the listeners to make donations in December and January; that would quickly lead to a double promotion on the Podcast Hall of Fame Page. Well, Gabriel S. took me up on the challenge, donating in both of those months. Since he already had the coveted water buffalo icon, Gabriel not only gets the ever-popular Shwe Dagon Pagoda icon, but also the brand-new icon I have just created for those who donate in four different years. I’ll tell you about the new icon at the end of this episode, but let’s get to business first. To all five donors, may everything you plan this year work out in your favor, whether or not those plans succeed. And now take it away with the opening music!

Episode 119: The Unconquered Kingdom, One More Time

Greetings, dear listeners, for the 119th time, from the hills of Bluegrass country in Kentucky! Are you ready for another trip to the tropical lands on the Pacific Rim? I am, because it’s January, and I got snowed in! One day eight inches of snow fell; that’s the most we have gotten in six years, at least. Because of that, I couldn’t leave home for two and a half days. I lived in Florida for forty years before coming to Kentucky, and my wife is from the Philippines; neither of those places taught us anything about what to do at a time like this!

But enough about winter; what tropical hotspot are we talking about today? The last time we got together, I told you to guess which country would be in the spotlight for this episode. Since Episode #97, we have been looking at the recent history of the countries in Southeast Asia. For most of those countries, the recent history has been completed; the narrative on them has gone all the way to the present. Any more episodes on them will not be about history, but about current events, and I have recently discovered another podcast that does a better job on current events. So if you look at a map of Southeast Asia, and eliminate the countries we have finished, who is left? The last one to cover is in the middle of the mainland; say hello again to Thailand.

Thailand, formerly known as Siam, has a unique history. Unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, it was never ruled as a colony by an outside power, unless you count the way Japan bullied it during World War II. That is how it got its nickname “the Unconquered Kingdom,” which I have used here. Therefore it didn’t have to overcome the problems suffered by its neighbors, but while there is a desire to run the country as a constitutional monarchy, with a figurehead monarch as the official head of state and an elected government handling the day-to-day affairs, for some reason the Thais have never managed to get this arrangement to work right. This means the military usually stepped in to reset everything when the political situation became unbalanced. Since 1932, there have been no less than 19 military coups, of which 12 have been successful. I believe this is the largest number of coups, for any country over the past century.

There have been three other episodes on Thailand in the podcast since we finished covering World War II. Episode #61 covered the brief reign of King Rama VIII, the mystery surrounding his death, and how Phibun Songgram, the military strongman for most of the war, staged a comeback and managed to rule for another decade. Then for Episode #99, we saw events leading up to the 1973 revolution, how it looked like true democracy was going to come to the country, and how the movement failed in 1976, resulting in the military seizing power again. And with Episode #109, we saw how the country fared for the last quarter of the twentieth century (hint: they’re still trying to get a government that works to everyone’s satisfaction). Go back to those episodes if you need to refresh your memory. Now that we got the preliminaries out of the way, let’s resume the story.

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<Interlude>

When the 2001 election came, the most recent prime minister, Chuan Leekpai, went down in a landslide defeat. The winner was the billionaire owner of the Shin Corporation (a telecommunications company) and a former police officer, Thaksin Shinawatra. In the 1990s, Thaksin had founded a political party called Thai Rak Thai (meaning “Thai Loving Thai,” or you can just call it TRT), which promised to help business and promote rural development. One month before the election, in December 2000, the tremendously popular Thaksin was indicted on corruption charges, but was acquitted in August 2001. Because of his telecommunications background, the new prime minister communicated directly with the voters and dominated the media.

In Episode #109, we saw that Thailand enjoyed rapid economic growth in the late twentieth century. For a while it looked like it would repeat the success of Japan and the so-called “Four Dragons”: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Then it stumbled in the Asian currency crisis of 1997, but a huge loan from the International Monetary Fund put it back on track. Fortunately Thaksin paid off the IMF debt before it was due, and by 2002 Thailand’s economy was booming again. From 2001 to 2019, GDP growth averaged 3.92% a year. The economy took another hit in 2020, declining 6% because of the COVID pandemic, but that’s to be expected, after seeing what happened to all the surrounding countries at the same time.

In February 2003, Thaksin announced plans to eliminate the drug trade from Thailand within three months. By the end of April, when the operation was concluded, nearly 2,300 people had been killed. Government officials claimed responsibility for just 35 of the casualties, blaming drug dealers and gang members for the rest. Human rights activists, however, suspected police forces were overly aggressive in their campaign.

In previous episodes, I told you that Thailand was one of the three countries, along with Myanmar and Laos, that shared land in the “Golden Triangle,” Southeast Asia’s infamous opium-growing zone. Well, Thaksin’s operation made Thailand opium-free, but then a decade later, in 2013, a new drug started passing through the country — methamphetamine.

Because we are now talking about synthetic drugs, including synthetic opiates, the process of making and transporting them was more complicated than for drugs grown naturally. Usually the base chemicals are made in a distant location like China; since these chemicals have other uses, like industrial and household cleaners, it is legal to transport some of them. One way or another, they are sent to Myanmar, where various groups, usually the ethnic minorities waging rebellions on Myanmar’s periphery, assemble the base chemicals into methamphetamine and related drugs. Incidentally, the chemicals made in China can also end up in the hands of drug manufacturers elsewhere, like the drug cartels in Mexico. In the case of Myanmar, it’s too risky to send the finished drugs directly to customers in the rest of the world, because most members of the Myanmar military do not support drug trafficking, and that country’s total amount of trade is small enough for the authorities to monitor it. Therefore, to get the drugs out of Southeast Asia, those made in Myanmar are smuggled into Thailand first, and then from Thailand to the outside world. Here the size of the huge Thai economy works to the drug smuggler’s advantage. Because Thailand imports and exports so many more goods than the neighboring countries, and because the Thai border patrols are understaffed, it is easier to get containers across the borders without somebody inspecting them and finding contraband inside.

Thaksin is also worth remembering because the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami took place while he was in charge. We covered this disaster in previous episodes of the podcast, especially Episode #103. Most of Thailand’s coast faces the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand; only a small area faces the nearest part of the Indian Ocean, the Andaman Sea. Nevertheless, at least 5,300 people in Thailand were killed by the tsunami, because the Andaman Sea coast includes the beach resort of Phuket, and Phuket was crowded with tourists who had come there for Christmas vacation.

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Meanwhile in the far south, a new problem appeared as the twenty-first century began. Three provinces on the Malaysian border (Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala) have a population that is predominantly Malay. The province next to them, Songkla, contains a large Malay minority. All four provinces had been a Malay sultanate called Pattani until the Thais conquered it in 1902. We also saw in previous episodes that this area was infested with communist guerillas for a generation after they had been defeated in Malaysia. As early as 1947, there was a Malay separatist movement in the area, but for most of the twentieth century it was dormant. Bangkok’s treatment of the area varied; during World War II the pro-Axis Phibun government tried to convert the Malays into Thai-speaking Buddhists; in the 1980s the Prem government abolished this policy, and introduced a program to develop the provinces, because this was the poorest part of the country. Then in 2001, Thaksin’s administration decided to increase central control over the provinces, because they voted for an opposing party, and the separatists began attacking people and government property in the area; they also made trouble in Phuket and Bangkok. The official response was harsh; insurgents were attacked in the historic Krue Se Mosque, and in Tak Bai, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested when they demanded the release of suspected insurgents; 78 of them suffocated in the overcrowded trucks, while being transported to an army camp for interrogation. Both of those incidents happened in 2004. In 2005, martial law was declared in the troubled provinces. In return, the separatists announced they want to establish an Islamic caliphate, accused Malays following traditional practices of not being Islamic enough, and expanded their targets to include civilians. The largest attack by the insurgents was staged in February 2007, when they exploded thirty bombs at bars, hotels, and power stations. By 2020, the rebellion had killed more than 7,000 on both sides, and wounded more than 13,000.

Podcast footnote: Way back in the early days of this podcast, I told you that in southern Thailand, a narrow land bridge, the Isthmus of Kra, separates the Andaman Sea from the Gulf of Thailand. At one point, the land is only 27 miles wide. Over the years, some have suggested that a canal on this spot would be a good idea; that would take 750 miles off a trip between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, because ships would not have to go around the Malay peninsula. As early as 1677, Siam’s King Narai asked a French engineer to see if building a canal was feasible. The engineer did a survey of the area, and said it wasn’t feasible, but of course, he didn’t have the technology for digging canals that we have now. Currently a road, not a canal, is being built to carry cargo across the isthmus. The latest estimate on a Kra Canal project, made in 2015, predicted that the canal would take at least ten years to build, and cost US $28 billion. Therefore, the canal is probably not worth the effort it would take to dig it. In February 2018, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha declared that the canal was not a government priority, but then in January 2020, the Thai House of Representatives agreed to set up a committee within 120 days to study the Thai Canal project. Some have suggested that the canal is being considered now, because it would put a physical barrier between the provinces containing Moslem separatists, and the rest of the country. Maybe so! End footnote.

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Anyway, because Thaksin kept his promises and responded quickly to the tsunami, he and the TRT were re-elected in 2005. This was the first time that a Thai prime minister managed to complete a four-year term, and win the election that followed. However, pollwatchers warned that the 2005 election wasn’t as clean; there were reports of vote buying and electoral violence, and the government was accused of starting new projects to gain more votes.

Elected presidents and prime ministers tend not to do as well in their second terms as they do the first time around, and Thaksin showed in his second term that he had worn out his welcome. He was accused of various conflicts of interest, starting with selling his family’s Shin Corporation stock to the Singaporean government, while taking advantage of a new law that exempted him from paying a capital gains tax. In addition, he was accused of being “at war” with journalists, getting along too well with the military junta in Myanmar, killing too many people in his “war on drugs,” and his authoritarian “CEO-style” approach to governing. As his opponents began holding mass rallies, Thaksin called for a snap election in April 2006, to show he was still popular. It didn’t work because Thaksin’s opponents boycotted the election, and though the TRT Party won again, the results were nullified by the Constitutional Court. A new election was scheduled for October, and then everybody took the month of June off to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the king’s accession to the throne. You will hear more about the king later in this episode.

The next election did not take place, because the military acted first; this was the first time they had gotten involved in politics in fourteen years. On September 19, 2006, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin staged a bloodless coup. Thaksin was attending a United Nations session in New York at the time, so the new rulers exiled him by voiding his passport. The junta removed everyone in the Thaksin government, declared martial law, replaced the constitution with an abbreviated, temporary one, and appointed Surayud Chulanont, a respected retired general, as the interim prime minister. Over the course of 2007, the TRT Party was dissolved, a new constitution was written and ratified, and new elections were held, allowing for civilian rule to return in January 2008. The People’s Power Party, or PPP, allies of Thaksin, won the election, taking 233 of the 480 seats in the parliament, and their candidate, Samak Sundaravej, became the next prime minister. Samak called himself a “proxy” for Thaksin, and said his top priority would be tackling rural poverty.

Podcast footnote: Sonthi Boonyaratglin is worth remembering, because he is the first Moslem commander-in-chief in Thai history. Thailand’s religious makeup is 94.5% Buddhist, 4.3% Moslem, 0.8 % Christian, and 0.4% others. End footnote.

As for Thaksin, he returned to Thailand in February 2008, after 17 months in exile. He said he was prepared to face corruption charges related to the property he acquired from a state agency during his tenure as prime minister. In July, his wife, Pojaman Shinawatra, was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to three years in jail. Thaksin failed to appear for a court appearance in August; instead, he and his wife fled to London. He left behind about $2 billion in assets that was frozen by the military when it took over in 2006. He has not come back since then, saying that he would not receive a fair trial in Thailand. He applied for refugee status in the Philippines and the United Kingdom, but neither country would have him. It looks like he is now in Dubai, but my sources aren’t sure. Dubai is the last place he was reported in, and he travels using six passports, none of them Thai.

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This isn’t the last word on Thaksin, though, because the opponents of Thaksin and the PPP, the People’s Alliance for Democracy, or PAD, began a series of well-organized demonstrations. The demonstrators wore yellow shirts, yellow representing the king’s birthday color. By seizing public spaces and government complexes, and camping out there for months with food, drinks, music and speeches, they interfered with government work and Bangkok’s traffic, while becoming a kind of tourist attraction at the same time. In response, supporters of the TRT and PPP organized their own movement, with red shirts; they called for getting rid of the latest constitution, giving amnesty to Thaksin, and because the Yellow Shirts identified themselves as royalists, they wanted to put new restrictions on the king’s power. It was also at this time that the UN accidentally resurrected Thailand’s claim to the Phra Viharn (Preah Vihear) temple, on the Cambodian border, as we mentioned in Episode #114.

Podcast footnote: If you are familiar with politics in the United States, you know that since at least the year 2000, the color red has come to represent the Republicans, and blue has come to represent the Democrats. Now we have colors taking a political meaning in Thailand, too. If you support a strong monarchy, your color is yellow, while if you want the monarchy’s power reduced, or — Buddha forbid — you want to eliminate the monarchy altogether, red is your color. You may remember from Episode #110 that yellow represents a political party in the Philippines as well. End footnote.

Prime Minister Samak chose not to use force to remove the demonstrators. However, in September 2008 the Constitutional Court ruled that Samak had a conflict of interest, because he was also the host of “Tasting and Complaining,” a cooking program on TV, and ordered both him and his ministers deposed. Hmmm, so Thailand had a male Julia Child for prime minister; I’m not making this up! He was replaced by another PPP member, Somchai Wongsawat, who was unable to use his offices because they were occupied by PAD protesters. Then the PAD occupied the country’s two main airports for a week, which stranded tourists and did real harm to the economy. The army called for new elections and a PAD withdrawal, without staging another coup. Instead, the coup came from the Constitutional Court, which ruled in December that the PPP must be dissolved because of vote buying. A parliamentary election chose the PAD candidate, British-born Mark Abhisit Vejjajiva, as Thailand’s 27th prime minister.

Abhisit presided over a six-party coalition government, and during his administration, Thailand’s economy felt the effects of the world financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the Great Recession that followed. Abhisit responded to the crisis with various stimulus programmes, while also expanding on some of the populist policies initiated by Thaksin.

Meanwhile, a “Red Shirt” group called the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, or UDD, began staging anti-government protests. In April 2009, the UDD staged protests in Pattaya, where they disrupted the fourth East Asia Summit, a meeting of Asian leaders, and also protested in Bangkok, leading to clashes with government forces. They were quiet for the rest of the year, but the UDD regathered in March 2010 to call for new elections. The protesters later occupied a large area of Bangkok’s central shopping district. This led to violent attacks, both against protesters and the government units called in, and negotiations between the government and the protest leaders failed to defuse tensions. Therefore, in May 2010, the military launched a crackdown to remove the protesters, leading to 68 deaths and arson attacks, before the government took control of the situation, and the UDD leaders surrendered. One of the dead was Khattiya Sawatdiphol, a general who sided with the red shirts.

In the effort to recover after the violence, new elections were held, which took place on July 3, 2011. This time the new party for the Red Shirt faction, the Pheu Thai Party, won 265 of the 500 parliamentary seats, allowing it to rule without the need to form a coalition. The party’s leader was Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin Shinawatra’s younger sister, so she became Thailand’s first female prime minister.

For 2011, 2012 and most of 2013, Thailand was relatively quiet, allowing Yingluck to keep her campaign promises from the latest election. There was severe flooding during the rainy season of 2011, causing damages for which the cost was estimated at 1.43 trillion baht, or $46 billion in US dollars.

The next time trouble started, it was because in November 2013, the lower house of the parliament passed a bill granting amnesty to those accused of crimes after the coup in 2006. This included former prime minister Thaksin, and more than 10,000 demonstrators took to the streets to protest the bill’s passage. Although the bill failed to pass the Senate, anti-government protests continued, with thousands of people taking to the streets to demand the resignation of Yingluck, who they said was a puppet of her brother Thaksin. On December 9, Yingluck dissolved parliament and called for early elections, scheduled for February 2014. The opposition boycotted the vote, and disrupted the election by preventing the delivery of ballot boxes to about 11% of the precincts, and by preventing some people from registering as candidates. The Constitutional Court ruled the election was invalid, because all the voting was supposed to take place on one day. Then in May the Constitutional Court ordered Yingluck to resign, after ruling that she abused power in 2011 when she removed a civil servant from his post and replaced him with a relative. This was considered a blatantly political ruling, and as you might expect, both anti- and pro-government protests continued, with the anti-government demonstrators shutting down several government buildings and taking over the prime minister’s office.

If you have been paying attention, you can guess what happened next. Did you say that the military got involved again? Yes, you get an A! On May 20, 2014, General Prayut Chan-o-cha declared martial law, to restore peace and order. He closed the country’s radio and television stations, requested that everyone stop protesting, and stated that the military was not launching another coup. Quote: “We urge people not to panic. Please carry on your daily activities as usual. The imposition of martial law is not a coup d’etat.” Unquote.

Nevertheless, two days later General Prayut felt it was necessary to stage a coup, so he seized power, installed a ruling junta called the National Council for Peace and Order, and threw out the latest constitution. The king endorsed the coup, formally appointing Prayut to “take charge of public administration,” and to most of the Thai people, that made Prayut the new rightful head of the government. An interim constitution was introduced in July. The parliament was replaced by a unicameral body called the National Legislative Assembly, whose members were picked by Prayut, and in August (Surprise!) they elected him prime minister. Prayut retired from the army in October, meaning that henceforth he would be a civilian leader.

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On August 17, 2015, a bomb exploded inside Erawan Shrine, in Bangkok. The blast killed 20 and injured 125; most of the victims were tourists visiting the shrine. This is the worst terrorist attack to have occured since the 2014 coup. A second bomb exploded on a passenger pier in Bangkok the following day, but no one was injured. No one claimed responsibility for the bombs, but the authorities later said the perpetrators belonged to a Turkic ultra-nationalist organization called the Grey Wolves, and they were retaliating because Thailand deported almost 100 Uighur terrorist suspects back to China, instead of allowing them to seek asylum in Turkey. Investigators found bomb-making materials that could have been used in the attacks, and the police arrested two suspects, Adem Karadag and Yusufu Mieraili; both of them are ethnic Uighur men. Karadag confessed to planting the first bomb, but he later retracted his confession, and his lawyer said that torture was used to extract the confession.

The trial of the suspects has been delayed and prolonged; my most recent source on it, dated January 2020, stated that the trial was still going on at that time, and another source predicted the trial would not end until 2024, at least. Part of the reason for the slow progress is the amount of information; there is security camera footage of the first explosion, and it showed a pipe bomb under a bench before it went off. Moreover, 447 people have been declared witnesses, and all of them are expected to testify. There is also a language barrier. Neither of the suspects speaks Chinese, but Mieraili knows English, so all court testimony has to be translated into English and Uighur. Finally, military court procedure runs slowly, with long periods of time between court dates, and because the first bombing was at a popular tourist attraction, the authorities don’t want to say anything about the case that could jeopardize Thailand’s tourism industry.

Podcast footnote: I don’t know if this is the longest-lasting trial on record. It has gone on for at least as long as the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former dictator of Yugoslavia. I am thinking of doing a podcast on Central Asia when I am done with this one, and since that would include the Uighur territory in northwest China, there’s a good chance I will be coming back to this case at a future date. End footnote.

Two years after the coup, on August 7, 2016, another constitution was passed in a referendum. This one, like the Burmese constitution that I told you about in the previous episode, contained many provisions that guaranteed the military would continue to have a role in politics. In place of the National Legislative Assembly, it promised a new legislative body called the National Assembly, which would convene after elections were held. The 500 members of the lower house, called the House of Representatives, would be chosen by election, while the 250-member Senate would be appointed by the military.

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Throughout all the events I have described, the king, Bhumibol Adulyadej Rama IX, has only gotten involved to curb the worst excesses of both the right and the left. In Episode #99, I told you how the king supported the 1973 revolution at first, but turned against it when it got out of hand three years later. In 1981 and 1985 coups were attempted against Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda, but the king and Queen Sirikit nipped them in the bud by openly endorsing Prem. In 1992, and once more in 2006, the king again acted as a moderator to defuse political violence. And as we saw a few minutes ago, one of the reasons why Thailand is stable now, is because the king endorsed the latest coup, in 2014.

For their enlightened actions, the king and queen are honored by everybody in the land. Even now, just about every Thai-owned house and business has a picture of the king on the wall; I have seen that picture when I walked into a Thai restaurant. In 2005, Duncan McCargo published an article in The Pacific Review, entitled Network monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand, where he coined the term “network monarchy” to describe how the king acted, when he intervened in Thailand’s political process. Rather than get directly involved, the king usually relied on friendly officials to express what he wanted. His favorite institution for acting indirectly was the privy council, where he kept proxies like former prime minister Prem. Thanks to those proxies, the king managed to recover much of the power that the monarchy had lost, in the coup of 1932.

This all ended on October 13, 2016, with the death of the 88-year-old king. In 2008, when he was eighty, the king stopped making his regular trips around the countryside, to meet with the people and discuss how he could improve their lives. From then on, illness caused him to go in and out of the hospital frequently. Often he only appeared in public when he received important visitors, like US President Barack Obama, in November 2012. Thailand has the world’s toughest laws against lése majesté, disrespectful treatment of the royal family. Under these laws, criticism of the king, queen, and crown prince can be punished with heavy fines and prison sentences. After the 2014 coup, the military silenced its critics by expanding the lése majesté laws to protect former kings, other members of the royal family, and even their pets. An example of the latter was reported by the Guardian; in 2015 Thanakorn Siripaiboon, a 27-year-old factory worker, was arrested for writing a “sarcastic” Facebook post about Tongdaeng, Rama IX’s dog. He was supposed to go to prison for 37 years, but Thanakorn’s lawyers were able to get him released on 500,000 baht ($14,000) after serving 86 days in prison. Also, when the International New York Times reported on the story, their local printer refused to print it, so the Thai edition of the newspaper had a blank space where the story should have been. Because of all this, during Rama IX’s final years, most Thais understandably did not want to talk about his condition.

Podcast footnote: In the mid-1980s, there was a popular song on the radio called “One Night in Bangkok.” The original was performed by Murray Head, but I heard another version of the song first, by a female artist named Robey. The Thai government thought “One Night in Bangkok” gave false impressions about Thailand, and banned the song from the country. Normally I’d play a sound clip, for those of you who are too young to remember the song, but I want to keep this podcast accessible to my Thai listeners; sorry. End footnote.

Rama IX enjoyed the longest reign in Thai history, 70 years and four months. In fact, he was alive when I launched this podcast. Many of his subjects went through their whole lives without knowing any other head of state. This is also the longest reign anywhere in the early twenty-first century. The only longer reign in my lifetime was that of Sobhuza II, the former king of Swaziland, a small African country. Sobhuza became king in 1899, when he was just four and a half months old, and ruled until his death in 1982, meaning his reign lasted for 82 years and eight months. And you have probably heard that England’s Queen Elizabeth II has the record for longest-ruling British monarch; if she is going to match the Thai record, she will have to stay on the throne until June of 2022.

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Rama IX had three daughters and one son. In the twentieth century, Rama VI was the last king to take more than one wife, and Rama the VI through the VIII did not have children, so the royal family isn’t as large as it used to be. I think I told you in a previous episode that to make sure there would be an heir to the throne, the Succession Law was changed in 1977, making women eligible to rule. Two of the royal daughters of Rama IX disqualified themselves by marrying men of commoner status; one of them married an American and lived in the United States for a while. The third daughter, Princess Sirindhorn, remained a candidate, and though she was popular, she was 61 years old at the time of her father’s death, unmarried and had no children; if she was crowned, the Chakri dynasty would end with her. That left the son, 64-year-old Prince Vajiralongkorn. Vajiralongkorn had seven children, but they came from three failed marriages. Moreover, the people didn’t know him very well, and didn’t like him much; he had spent at least half of his adult life abroad, mostly at a second home in Germany, and even the lése majesté laws couldn’t do much to make him look good. In fact, he was hurriedly called back to Thailand just before his father’s death. Still, Vajiralongkorn’s kids made him the best candidate, so after he requested time off to mourn his father, he accepted the throne on December 1, 2016, becoming King Rama X. One of his first acts was to give his father a posthumous title, King Bhumibol the Great. A year of mourning was held across the whole country, ending with the king’s cremation on October 26, 2017. For this ceremony, a lavish procession took the king’s body in a coffin to the cremation ground, which was decorated to look like Mt. Meru, the five-peaked mountain that is the home of the gods in Hindu mythology.

The actual coronation of Rama X did not take place until May 4, 2019. Three days earlier, he married his current love interest, a former flight attendant and army officer named Suthida Tidjai. This was his fourth marriage so far, and the marriage made Suthida the new queen. But he didn’t stop there; it looks like Vajiralongkorn wants to revive the old custom of royal polygamy. At the end of July he named a 34-year-old general, Niramon Ounprom, as the royal consort, meaning an official concubine, and gave her a more noble name, Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi. When Thailand’s Royal Household Bureau posted a biography and more than 60 photos of the new consort, they literally broke the Internet; so many people accessed the Bureau’s website that it crashed. Then in October 2019, the king and consort had a falling out. A palace order stripped Sineenat of her title, ranks, and decorations, stating that she had been disrespectful to Queen Suthida and disloyal to the king. Sineenat disappeared, and for the next ten months, the public did not know if she was alive or dead.

When COVID-19 struck, Vajiralongkorn returned to his old habits. He chose in early 2020 to spend the COVID quarantine in Germany, rather than in Thailand. He rented a four-star hotel in the Bavarian Alps, and spent most of the year there. His presence in the hotel sparked controversy in both Germany and Thailand; the Germans don’t want the king governing on German soil. In August he sent one of the planes in his fleet, a Boeing 737, to fetch Sineenat; it turned out she had been held in a Bangkok prison. Once she was with the royal entourage, her titles were restored with two declarations. The first said that Sineenat, quote, “is not tarnished,” unquote, and the second said, quote, “Henceforth, it will be as if she had never been stripped of her military ranks or royal decorations.” Unquote.

Even now, after the quarantine, Rama X prefers to stay in Germany, because it keeps him away from protests in Thailand. Still, he has declared that he does not want to enforce the harsh lése majesté laws, and that has improved his popularity a bit. To quote Mel Brooks, it’s good to be king!

Meanwhile, after many postponements, the first election since the 2014 coup took place on March 24, 2019; 77 parties participated. Critics accused the election of being skewed so that Prayut Chan-o-cha had an unfair advantage. The Pheu Thai Party, which we saw favored Thaksin and the Red Shirts, did the best, winning 136 seats, compared with 116 seats for Palang Pracharath, the new pro-military party. Even so, when the time came to elect a prime minister, the Senate and Palang Pracharath Party worked together to choose Prayut; the vote was 500 to 244. Thus, Prayut is still prime minister at the time of this recording, having been in that office for nearly seven and a half years. There have been protests against Prayut’s continued rule and his poor record on human rights, but since 2020 these protests have been dampened, because more people are concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Thailand is usually classified as a developing country, since the per capita income, when modified to reflect purchasing power, is US $18,570, well below Western standards. That is fourth place for Southeast Asia, though, after Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia. From a social standpoint, Thailand is Southeast Asia’s most successful nation. Because they have never been dominated by foreigners, the Thais have been able to develop at their own pace. Culture shock has been avoided, and traditional institutions like the monarchy and Buddhism have entered the modern world relatively intact, a remarkable accomplishment when the rest of Southeast Asia has either slipped into seedy socialist decay or lost its identity in a maze of skyscrapers, fast-food restaurants, and the pop culture of the West. And the population, which has grown from 17 million to almost 69 million since World War II, is now increasing at a much safer annual rate of 0.3%, about the same as the developed West.

As the same time, the influence of the outside world has put strong pressure on Thailand, especially the influence of the United States. A few decades ago, a Thai official summarized his country’s relations with the US by saying, quote, “The Americans are good for business but bad for our culture.” Unquote. Along that line, I read a news story about tourism in Thailand while researching this episode. In 2019, 40 million tourists came to Thailand, and spent 1.91 trillion baht, or $57.3 billion US dollars, so it’s an understatement to say that tourism is a major component of the economy. Because of the COVID lockdowns, the number of foreign tourists dropped to 6.7 million in 2020, and for 2021, only about 200,000 tourists arrived. Now that the country is opening up again, officials are rethinking what kind of tourists they will let in. Instead of just allowing in anyone who can afford a plane ticket to Bangkok, they are talking about focussing on “high-end travellers.” This means not only tourists with lots of money, but also those with valuable skills, and those planning an extended stay, such as foreigners coming to work at jobs in the country, and retirees. Now the buzzword for the tourism industry will be quality, rather than quantity.

An example of the changes can be seen with Maya Bay, a beautiful cove that was made famous because The Beach, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie, was filmed there. In the past, as many as 6,000 visitors came each day, sunbathing on its shores, swimming in the aquamarine waters, and dropping anchors on top of the coral reefs. They left trash on the beach, scared away much of the local wildlife, and caused around 60 percent of the coral to disappear. In response to this “overtourism,” the authorities closed Maya Bay to visitors in 2018. Since then they have replanted the coral, sea turtles have returned to Maya Bay, and endangered whale sharks have been seen off the coast. While the recovery of the local ecology is good news, it is estimated that it will take another twenty years without visitors to make the recovery complete. Currently the plan is to allow no more than 300 visitors a day, in a maximum of eight boats that will dock at a nearby pier, not in the cove itself, and the tourists will only be allowed to stay for an hour. Will this strike an acceptable balance between the desires of people and the needs of nature? If it works, you can expect similar restrictions at other attractions, and your stay in Thailand will be more regulated than it was before, all for the good of everyone and the environment.

Of course, any changes to the way Thailand handles tourism will affect its notorious sex trade. I briefly mentioned this business in Episode #109. It is bad enough when children are involved, but since the 1980s, the problem has been compounded by the spread of AIDS. This not only threatens the sex business, which is a large source of foreign tourism, but it also threatens the future of the country, as large numbers of people not directly involved in the sex trade become infected. How the Thais cope with this is another challenge the rest of the world will be watching in the twenty-first century.

Since the 1980s, the Thais have cultivated better relations with countries that aren’t pro-Western, using Thailand’s healthy economy to make deals with less fortunate neighbors. Some of these ventures involved Libya, Myanmar and the Khmer Rouge, sparking protests from Washington. The strain in Thai-US relations caused Thailand to apply for membership in the Nonaligned Movement in 1993. What all this means is that Thailand’s future, for better or for worse, will be tied more closely to that of her neighbors; the Thai approach to problem-solving will also set an example for other Southeast Asians to follow.

<Interlude>

*****

We. Are. Done.

In 119 episodes, which took five years and eight months to record in real time, we have completed the historical narrative on every country in Southeast Asia; their histories have been brought all the way to the beginning of 2022. Are we done with the podcast? Not quite! I expect to do at least two more episodes, and maybe at a future date I will do another one covering new events in the region, like if one of the countries gets a leader as controversial as Mr. Duterte in the Philippines, or the generals running Myanmar.

What’s next? For Episode #120, I am planning a question-and answer session. You ask the questions, and I try to answer them as best as I can. So far I have only gotten from you three questions, plus a request for an episode on a special topic. Unless you send me more, the next episode will be a short one. You can ask the questions on the podcast’s Facebook Page (look for History of Southeast Asia Podcast on Facebook), or by emailing me at Berosus@gmail.com. That’s B-E-R-O-S-U-S, at gmail.com. I will be taking those questions for the rest of February 2022, so send them to me today!

If you enjoyed this episode, consider making a donation to support the show. Like I have said before, this podcast is free for you the listeners, but not for me the podcaster; whereas it shouldn’t cost you anything to download and listen to the episodes, it costs me some money, and more than a little time, to produce them. To make a one-time donation, follow the Paypal links I posted, on the Blubrry.com page where this episode is hosted, or on the podcast’s Facebook page. After you click on the link, follow the instructions. You can also support the podcast by becoming a Patron, where you pledge to give a small amount at the beginning of each month, $1 or more. If you want to do that, there is also a Patreon link on the previously mentioned Blubrry page.

Those who make a one-time donation will get their first names added to the Podcast’s Hall of Fame Page. And if you donate in more than one year, there’s more. Those who donate in two different years will get the coveted water buffalo icon added, next to their name. Those who donate in three years will get the ever-popular Shwedagon Pagoda icon added next to their name as well. And here’s the newest feature; those who donate for four years will get the brand-new OUTRAGEOUS Merlion icon!

Why do we have the Merlion, Singapore’s national symbol? When I added the first icon to the Podcast Hall of Fame Page, I chose Walter the Water Buffalo, because water buffaloes, or carabao, to use the Philippine name, can be found in almost every Southeast Asian country; they are extremely useful for farmers growing rice. In fact, I think the only country where water buffaloes are not a common sight is Singapore, due to geography; Singapore is one small island with a very large city on it. As for the ever-popular Shwedagon Pagoda icon, you all should know by now that this icon represents the most famous monument in Myanmar. So when the time came to add a new icon after that, I decided that since Singapore was not represented by either the water buffalo or the pagoda, we should now have something that represents Singapore, so I made an icon representing one of the most familiar sights in Singapore, the Merlion fountain. The story behind the Merlion is told in Episode #76, and if you download the episodes before listening to them, you may have noticed that for the past year and a half, the cover art for each episode has been a picture of the Merlion. So Gabriel S. is now the first donor to win the OUTRAGEOUS Merlion icon!

In previous episodes, I told you how many donors had made pledges to support the show on Patreon, but I never gave them name recognition. So here is a shout-out to the 23 Patrons currently active. My hat is off to Brian T., Tom (no last name listed), Lou C., Smiley, Mikael, Markus G., Caroline L., Morten P., Deren T., Andrew K., Peg F., Delanie C., Joel P., AJ F., Grahamkell, David P., Prince T., Robert R., Wally D., Gabriel S., Michael L., Christian M., and Ed D!

<Applause>

Finally, I want to give a big thank you to all of you who have promoted the podcast, either by writing reviews or by telling your family and friends in the real world. Okay, I have talked enough for this episode. Thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>