Thailand

Shifting Ground Between the US and a Rising China

Benjamin Zawacki

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755638130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Thailand was a key ally of the United States after WWII, serving as a bulwark against communism in Southeast Asia and as a base for US troops during the Vietnam War. In return, the US provided it with millions of dollars in military and economic aid, and staunchly supported the country's various despotic regimes. And yet, the twenty-first century has witnessed a striking reversal in Thailand's foreign relations: China, once a sworn enemy, is becoming a valued ally to the military government. In this authoritative modern history, Benjamin Zawacki tells the story of Thailand's changing role in the world order. Featuring major interviews with high ranking sources in Thailand and the US, including deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand is a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the Thai elite and their dealings with the US and China.

Part One

Chapter One:
The Fog of Peace (1945–1949)

Neighbors on all sides of Siam—Indo-China, Burma, India, and Indonesia—were deep in it. Siam, always wise or wily enough to retain her sovereignty from one monarch to the next, stood only in the shallows of the stream; but there was no doubt that this capricious Kingdom would one day feel the full force of the movement.¹

Alexander MacDonald, Bangkok Editor, 1949

So wrote the American ex-intelligence officer and founder of the Bangkok Post of early 1946 Siam. The half-century alliance between his home country and the country he called home was hardly foreseeable. The Japanese—to which the kingdom had been both friend and foe during the recent world war—were all but gone after four years of occupation. US history in Siam was neither long nor exacting; American missionaries would continue to outnumber officials through the end of the decade. In 1833, Siam was the first Asian country with which the US signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce. In 1856, a Siamese official claimed, “We love the Americans, for they have never done us or anyone else in the East an injury.”² The US was deft, however, in exerting influence surgically and strategically by offering a foreign policy advisor as early as 1903. In 1920, President Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law regained for Siam the jurisdiction it had previously forfeited to European powers over persons living there, earning high praise for his country.

This intimate US‒Thai relationship would continue throughout World War II and greatly influence the immediate postwar dynamics. On the very day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, its troops attacked Thailand in nine locations. While the US had recently canceled a sale of fighters to Thailand, Thai Prime Minister Phibun Songkram kept a promise and ordered courageous but short-lived resistance. Days later, Thailand’s ambassador to the US, Seni Pramoj, declared himself independent of his government and announced the creation of a small Free Thai Movement in support of the Allies. He would later recall the response of a US official: “You are our first ally.”³ Seni further refused to deliver his country’s declaration of war on the Allies to the secretary of state.

At the same time, one Pridi Phanamyong began organizing a separate and far larger Free Thai Movement in Thailand against the Japanese, while the US founded the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The OSS would provide structure, funding, training, arms, and operational relevance to Pridi’s membership of up to 10,000 Thais. (The best known OSS officer, albeit for his later Thai silk business and mysterious disappearance, was Jim Thompson.) Neither Free Thai Movement was involved in a major operation or uprising, but their leaders would put their stamp on Siam’s political direction after the war. Seni was made prime minister, while Pridi was regent for Siam’s young king, whom President Harry Truman hoped would visit the US. In June 1946, however, Pridi fell under suspicion over the king’s sudden death—shot by a pistol that had been given him by a former OSS officer.

ENTER THE CHINESE

At the root of the suspicion was a China at war with itself. A year after Pridi helped overthrow Siam’s absolute monarchy in 1932, the kingdom passed an anti-communist law partly out of concern for his economic plans. It was to China that Pridi and the OSS sent contingents of Free Thai during World War II. Both Chiang Kai-shek and Truman, who hosted Pridi on a US tour in 1947, suspected him of communist leanings. And it was to China that Pridi would flee in 1949, just eight months before the communists prevailed in its long civil war. Living in Peking and placed by propaganda in southern Yunnan province, Pridi would later haunt his country and vilify its American ally from Chinese soil.

Since the late 19th century, the Chinese had been influencing Thailand more deeply, subtly—and despite Thai efforts—more irrepressibly than the Americans. Expressly excluded from political and military participation, and remaining socially apart save for their predominant role in the economy, over a million Chinese immigrants had entered the country by 1910. Sun Yat-sen had visited two years before and convinced most Chinese in Siam to support his nationalist cause against the communist challenge. Prior to a 1913 Nationality Act, Chinese could become Siamese citizens by registering as subjects, acquiring local names, and pledging loyalty to crown and country. But neither Chinese side favored a monarchy, while Siam’s king described them as “every bit as unscrupulous and as unconscionable as the Jews … aliens by birth, by nature, by sympathy, by language, and finally by choice”.⁴

Racism aside, it was not entirely “by choice” but by law that the Chinese focused so much on money and markets. As a result, they recognized and sought to protect the advantage of their exclusion through underground societies and monopolistic practices. The last large wave of Chinese immigration occurred in the 1920s, consisting of roughly 100,000 per year. In 1921 a business known later as the Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group was founded. Destined to grow in size, economic reach, and political influence later in the century and well into the next, it began as a simple Bangkok seed shop.

Phibun Songkram changed the country’s name to Thailand to reflect nationalist sentiment, after becoming prime minister in 1938. He instituted anti-Chinese policies to reduce economic power and increase assimilation, and imposed a raft of cultural edicts on Thais to set them apart from the Chinese. Remittances to China had become a significant drain on Thailand’s economy, as had Chinese nationalism, since Japan (at war with China) was a major trading partner of Thailand. Chinese businesses were taxed or taken over—twenty-seven occupations were decreed for Thais only—separate schools were monitored, and Chinese newspapers were closed. Despite a letter from Chiang Kai-shek in 1940 asking for the protection of ethnic Chinese in Thailand, Phibun continued imprisoning and deporting leaders of both nationalist and communist causes.⁵

However, when World War II began favoring the Allies, Phibun gave way to sudden doubts and tacitly permitted Thailand’s ethnic Chinese to assist the Free Thai and form a new Thai Communist Party. The partial shift was significant, for it was Phibun who had broken with Seni and Pridi and joined Japan in declaring war on the Allies in 1941. Finally, like Pridi, Phibun also reached out to Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces abroad, and allowed the US to use northern Thailand for supplying nationalists in Burma with arms and assistance. By late 1944, Phibun’s government, the Free Thai of Pridi and the OSS, and Chinese within and outside Thailand on both sides of their civil war, briefly cooperated in resisting the Japanese.

FAR-REACHING COMPROMISES

This partnership would hold for nearly three years. In addition to treating Thailand’s declaration of war as having been made under duress, the US helped Siam establish diplomatic relations with China and gain membership in the newly formed United Nations, both in late 1946. To further avoid Siam being seen as a Japanese ally, the US not only allowed Phibun to be tried for war crimes domestically (rather than in Tokyo), but acquiesced to—and possibly influenced—the decision to acquit him; “Personal considerations took precedence over legal technicalities.”⁶

More than any other, this single stroke of US policy in Siam during the heady months after the war helped determine the country’s political nature and trajectory for the next half-century: military-dominated and pro-American. With brief exception, it would not be democratic and it would neither stand alone nor align itself with any other country or ideological bloc. The acquittal also ran against repeated requests for US support by Pridi, Thailand’s elected and civilian prime minister. Phibun’s rehabilitation not only helped return him to military prominence, but helped settle any question of the military’s place in a Thailand no longer at war.

The Chinese nationalists (Kuomintang) disagreed with Phibun’s acquittal, but resembled him in their wartime equivocation. Chiang Kai-shek announced in early 1943 that China had no territorial ambitions in Thailand and implored the Thais to join in defeating Japan. President Roosevelt endorsed this. However, when Pridi sent a delegation to southern China to meet the nationalist and Allied forces—none of whom yet knew of the Free Thai Movement in Thailand—the nationalists detained them. The main reason was that they harbored irredentist or sanctuary aims in Thailand depending on how the war ended, and thus did not want the Americans—then playing host to Chiang’s wife in the US—to interfere. The delegates were eventually allowed to set up a Free Thai government in exile and meet the Allied forces, enabling the first contact between the two Free Thai factions. It also led to a firm commitment by Roosevelt and Chiang in 1944 to restore and protect Thailand’s independence after the war.

Although Seni would use force to put down opportunistic nationalist “victors” in Bangkok (a witness recalled seeing Japanese trucks abandoned on Sukhumvit 19, one of the city’s main roads), he also rescinded certain anti-Chinese laws and policies. In Siam’s first Immigration Act, China’s annual quota of 10,000 dwarfed that for all other nations of 200. The country also repealed the 1933 anti-communist law and legalized the Thai Communist Party. In 1947, Pridi was able to become a member of a new Thai‒Chinese Friendship Society in Bangkok.

SETTING THE STAGE

In 1948, Phibun usurped power from the “pro-American” Democrat Party, followed by a communist victory in China the following year.⁷ This again realigned the actors and interests at play, only this time settling them for the next half-century. The US protested Phibun’s move on both principled and personal grounds, but it did “not waste its breath on moralistic foreign policy, not at a time when China was falling to Mao and the Thai military could actually control the country”.⁸ It fully recognized him as Siam’s unelected prime minister in uniform, and immediately reconsidered his previous request for arms.

Phibun’s return was greeted in Bangkok by both sides of China’s civil war with “an almost visible, collective shudder”.⁹ While the nationalist embassy would remain for nearly three more decades, Phibun outlawed the movement outside its walls. Among the twenty-five official reasons given for the coup was that “the Chinese are above the law”.¹⁰ Planting seeds of both increased assimilation and fear of communist infiltration, some Chinese left Bangkok for Thailand’s provinces. Conversely, Thais were not permitted to travel or study in China, and at least ten occupations were again reserved for Thais only. Phibun slashed the annual Chinese immigration quota to 200, outlawed Chinese associations, and closed all Chinese schools above the primary level. By mid-1949 the US asked the nationalists to support the new Thai regime.

US support for Phibun, however reluctant at times, was accompanied by an opposite relationship with Pridi, whose Free Thai missions to the nationalist Chinese acted as something of a political stain after the war. His closest companions, supported to the end by the fiercely loyal OSS, would all either be killed in police custody or imprisoned; like Pridi, they were deemed communist, republican, or both. In view of his real and imputed political leanings, the US simply did not permit him—as it did itself—to drop his support for “China” when the communists took over. The OSS would assist Pridi in escaping to Singapore before Phibun’s power grab, only after the State Department denied him US transit. He returned in 1949 for a failed coup attempt of his own—aided by the nationalists but not the Americans—before fleeing a final time to Peking.

And therein lies the historical irony. The State Department’s backing of Phibun would relegate it to the US foreign policy wilderness in Thailand. As successor to the outmaneuvered OSS, the CIA would emphatically assume a leading role in Thailand for nearly a quarter-century—aligning itself with another of Phibun’s rivals. Alongside it would be the US military, which had advocated an arms deal with Phibun as early as 1947. Save for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), whose operations were thoroughly subsumed, infiltrated, and/or dictated by the CIA, the State Department would become negligible to the US‒Thailand relationship. Decades of skillful, brave, even inventive diplomacy in both Washington and Bangkok had seen off challenges to the kingdom’s sovereignty and prepared both nations for a long and durable alliance. But with Phibun back in power, its services were no longer required.

Chapter Two:
Means of Power (1949–1957)

Generally Americans in Asia are not effective. They are what I call the Intellectual Maginot Line. They feel that if the nice rich respectable people like them, they must be doing a good job. I can understand that. You look at foreign faces, hear strange languages—and you just feel more comfortable at the Press Club or the American Club or the Officer’s Club.¹

Ruth Jyoti in The Ugly American, 1958

Less than a year before Mao Zedong declared victory in China, a less recalled but equally lasting event occurred across the globe: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the UN General Assembly. Informed by the horrors of World War II, the UDHR was followed in 1949 by the Geneva Conventions on armed conflict and the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees two years later. Siam, the US, and China all signed the former; only China would eventually accede to the latter. Phibun hoped “a strong and effective Southeast Asian Alliance might be formed under United Nations auspices and with the United States an active participant”.² In 1951, Thailand began supporting the US position that Communist China’s treatment of its people violated the UDHR, and announced that “human rights covering bodily safety and property [of the Chinese] and other aliens would be fully protected” at home.³

Nevertheless, the rule of law had broken down in Thailand during the war, and the process of determining who would rebuild it was often a violent one. In the wake of the young king’s death, Pridi declared a state of emergency and censored the press. Phibun dealt violently with Muslims on Thailand’s southern border with Malaya, and stepped up targeting of the ethnic Chinese. Following Pridi’s attempted coup, Phibun and his police chief, one Phao Sriyanond, had many of the Free Thai tortured, “reminding the people that disagreement with the police knights meant digging their own graves”.⁴ Over the coming decades, many of these rights violations would be repeated so widely and often in Thailand as to become, explicitly or effectively, state policy. Most enduring—the legacy of Phibun’s walking away from war crimes—was a national commitment to impunity. “A free country was left after the negotiations”, Seni later conceded, “A free country so that [Thais] can indulge in politics in the worst way they can, that’s what happened.”⁵

UNITED BY A DIVIDED CHINA

The chief cause for US interest in Thailand after the war becoming a bona fide alliance, was Mao’s victory on the mainland. The Cold War’s early drafts suddenly turned into alarming gusts of wind, as the Soviet Union was joined ideologically by an Asian giant of 500 million people. Both had been allies during World War II and both were fellow members of the UN’s newly formed Se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction to the Second Edition: An Ill-Fated Moon
• Introduction: Points of Departure
• PART I
• Interface
• PART II
• Afterword: The Drift Goes On (2014–2020)
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• Copyright Page