Who Sold Thailand?
3 December 2008
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A few months ago, just as the situation on the streets of Bangkok was beginning to get out of hand, an acquaintance of mine (a highly educated Thai woman) lamented in very emotional terms the grave danger that the PPP government posed to the future of Thailand. For the first time in its history, she said, Thailand has a government hell-bent on “selling the country off.” She volunteered no specifics, but I knew what she was talking about.
For years now, the PAD has repeatedly warned the nation that Thaksin Shinawatra and his cronies are giving the country away to the highest bidder. (More on this in a previous post: “Thai politics according to the PAD“). To whom is Thaksin accused of selling his country? The PAD points to two foreign governments in particular: Singapore and the United States. With regard to the former, the PAD’s main grievance is that during his tenure as Prime Minister Mr. Thaksin sold Shin Corp. to Temasek Holdings, a company owned by the Singaporean government. The transaction soon proved highly controversial. The Shinawatra family found a way to avoid paying capital gains taxes on the $2 billion sale, stoking the already mounting anger against their perceived use of public office for private gain. Moreover, because the sale included highly sensitive assets (such as satellites), Thaksin was accused of compromising national security. The sale generated widespread criticism from many quarters. It is at this point, for instance, that current PAD leader Maj.-Gen. Chamlong Srimuang (who first introduced Thaksin to politics back in the mid-1990s) joined the anti-Thaksin camp. With regard to the United States, the charges are somewhat less specific and less clearly articulated, but the PAD often zeros in on allegedly exploitative, unequal free trade agreements.
This is very powerful rhetoric in present-day Thailand. In and of themselves, charges of selling the country off to foreign economic interests resonate with much of the urban middle class and the urban bourgeoisie. Interestingly, that is the charge that Thaksin himself leveled against then-Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai (Democrat Party) in the wake of the Asian crisis. During the Asian crisis, Thailand was widely regarded (at least internally) as the victim of international capitalism and globalization. Though ultimately successful in engineering Thailand’s economic recovery, Chuan and his cabinet were deeply unpopular because of their close identification with the International Monetary Fund and its policies of “structural adjustment.” At that time, Bangkok’s business community supported Thaksin wholeheartedly. Thaksin, after all, was one of their own. What is more, Thai Rak Thai promised big business that the new government would not sell the country’s interests out to foreigners, as Chuan and his buddies at the IMF were accused of doing.
There is more to this charge, however, than simple economic nationalism. Perhaps more importantly, the imagery of the venal Singaporean and the imperialist Westerner plays to highly entrenched racial stereotypes. The Chinese, for one, have long been stigmatized by the authorities in Thailand along much the same lines European Jews once were: greedy, ruthless, crafty, and disloyal to the Thai state. Given that much of the Thai elite today is Sino-Thai, however, it is perhaps the ugly American (and, by extension, the amorphous, undifferentiated category of white men somewhat disparagingly referred to as “farang”) that provokes the deepest, most intense resentment in many well-educated, affluent Thais.
The farang is not much loved by those elements in the Thai elites most prone to supporting the PAD. To be sure, beyond the miscellany of geo-political grievances that the editorial pages of Thailand’s English-language newspapers relentlessly, if rather inelegantly, articulate, the animosity is often well-deserved. After all, the white man’s immorality and boorishness is on permanent display in Bangkok, at every hour of the day and night. Even as far back as the 16th century, Dutch traders sojourning in the old Siamese capital of Ayutthaya had quite a penchant for taking local concubines, fathering multiple children, and then readily abandoning their offspring upon returning to Europe. So many Dutchmen left children fatherless in Ayutthaya, it seems, that an orphanage of sorts appears to have been in operation for the sole purpose of attending to the half-bred. By the 19th century, when the Kingdom of Siam witnessed a substantial influx of Western merchants, artists, engineers, and bureaucrats, close to the very last one of them had one or more Thai mistresses – some apparently went so far as to maintain full-fledged harems. And it is well known that at least since the halcyon days of the Vietnam War – when a military government drooling for American aid and investment rented out to American servicemen its least valuable human resources – Westerners in Thailand have been strictly on their worst behavior.
When the PAD accuses the government of “selling the country off” to Westerners, the charge evokes familiar scenes that Bangkok residents see unfolding every day before their very eyes. But who exactly is responsible for pimping Thailand’s young provincial daughters out to Westerners? Who, if not the country’s self-styled paternalistic leadership? And why, if not for the benefit of the very same urban elites who are now the heart and soul of the PAD?
* * *
The urban, upper-middle class public holds rather conflicting images of the tens of thousands of provincial girls whom Westerners assiduously patronize in the dazzling number of brothels, massage parlors, and bars operating in Bangkok and elsewhere. On the one hand, as the country has grown internationally synonymous with cheap and easy sex, the girls (and boys) have been portrayed as quintessentially un-Thai. In this narrative, they are a scourge, an indelible stain on the image of Thailand around the world that essentially enables the fiendish white man to further weaken the country with the intent to rape it and pillage it more freely still. On the other hand, at times the prostitute is used as a metaphor for Thailand itself – a country whose blissful, bucolic innocence has been forever lost to the white man’s overbearing, foam-at-the-mouth rapaciousness.
As a matter of personal choice, it is certainly the case that prostitution is borne of the lack of economic opportunity. In this sense, those who see Thailand as the hapless victim of a rigged system of globalized capitalism may be right to trace such lack of opportunity to the subordinate position to which Thailand is relegated on the world stage. It is also the case that in spite of the economic boom the country has experienced over the past 30 years, its largely rural population has suffered from international competition. Their goods have gotten cheaper, their daughters more readily available. But this nativist reasoning conveniently ignores the fact that the conscious, deliberate transformation of Thailand into the West’s playroom was motivated by the opportunity for massive financial gain it presented to those who had already been blessed with riches and power – politicians, generals, noblemen, and their friends in the business community. And it neglects to consider how it benefits the otherwise clean, high-minded bourgeoisie, who can go about its business without wasting too much time thinking about exporting a measure of economic opportunity out to the provinces.
* * *
As a legal construct, monogamy is a recent import to Thailand. Though de facto restricted to noblemen and, more recently, to commoners who had risen to top positions in the bureaucracy, among such groups polygyny was practiced well into the 20th century. When it was proscribed in 1935, after decades of debate that gradually spilled from the small circle of the king’s closest advisers into the public arena, the practice had long ceased to play its historical function. By the turn of the century, the replacement of a system of feudal vassalage with an absolute monarchy (endowed with a bureaucratic and military apparatus extending deep into the provinces) had rendered this system largely superfluous.
The sole purpose that polygyny now served, it seems, was to quench the nobleman’s taste for variety and parade his virility for the whole world to see. The government went so far as to craft rambling defenses of polygamy as a symbol of religious and national identity – the best they could do on this count was note that that nowhere is the practice explicitly prohibited in Buddhist texts and teachings. That much of the nobility obstinately defended the practice, however, was to their great collective detriment. As the absolute monarchy began to run afoul of an increasingly vociferous, modernized middle class in Bangkok, polygamy figured prominently in the pointed derision of the nobility as a listless, profligate, lascivious holdover from an uncivilized time. When the disgust spread deeply enough into the bureaucracy and the military, it offered top officials the perfect opportunity to take power in 1932.
Bangkok’s bourgeoisie, however, turned out to be not that different from its European counterpart. That they increasingly identified with liberal ideals of equality and freedom – and grounded their virtually unanimous condemnation of polygamy in Enlightenment ideas – does not mean they really practiced monogamy themselves. It was precisely as the calls for legal reforms in matters of family law intensified that the sex industry exploded into a massive business. Legally sanctioned, officially licensed, and regularly taxed prostitution had been around for centuries. But if it had experienced considerable growth in the 19th century, owing to the immigration of Chinese men who almost invariably left their women behind, it was the institution of a modern, salaried bureaucracy – and hence the very creation of an upper-middle class – that infused loads of freshly minted cash into the trade. In the space of a few decades in the early 20th century, brothels became one of Bangkok’s main claims to fame. Streetwalkers appeared all over town. And the erotic shows precursive of those that now attract throngs of tourists in Patpong – where ugly women use chewed up vaginas to smoke cigarettes, play the trumpet, or shoot darts into balloons 15 feet away – became a staple of the city’s famed nightlife. Modernization might enlighten minds, but nobody’s penis has ever read Diderot, Montesquieu, or Voltaire.
For the women, the motivation to staff brothels was much the same back then as it is today. Among the tiniest of the millions-strong masses of little people (poo noy), there existed a long tradition of female participation in the labor force – much like today, women were often expected to work to feed their parents and their children. And if, much like today, the economic life of the city offered women “with needs” a plethora of demeaning, exploitative careers, selling sex was often the most remunerative among them. Tens of thousands went for it willingly, if not eagerly. Many others had the decision made for them, as it was customary for parents to sell teenage daughters to brothel keepers to pay off debts or in any case cash out the proceeds of their investment (as bearing female children in many parts of the world may seem) in a single lump sum.
The glaring dissonance between the reality of an exploding market for able-bodied women and the myth of a sexually conservative populace – now further enlightened by a newfound sense of national identity, individual freedom, and equality – was patched up with the very same glue that precariously holds together every cultural system known to mankind. The solution was an immoderate dose of hypocrisy in the public debate about women and morality as well as the enshrinement of said hypocrisy in the nation’s legal apparatus. In this sense, Thailand is just like any other country, where the disconnect between theory and practice is routinely swept under the rug, dismissed as unimportant, or rationalized through the wildest of propositions. The problem for Thailand is that the trade kept booming, to the point that it now employs by most estimates at least several tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of women.
In the face of the first, almost entirely homegrown boom at the turn of the twentieth century, the government’s instinct was to profit from the trade – just as it did in pre-modern times, when brothels in Ayutthaya were registered, tax-paying businesses. And so brothel taxes, much like those levied on opium and gambling dens, in earnest began making sizable contributions to state coffers – a contribution that was, however, attenuated by the countervailing determination of entrepreneurs and civil servants to profit from the trade at the government’s expense. With the active co-participation of police and high-ranking civil servants, many a self-respecting brothel owner took his business underground. On the one hand, the entrepreneurs merely sought to maximize profits – then as now, bribes were cheaper than taxes. On the other hand, they sought to minimize the risk that their businesses would be shut down should too many of their workers be found to be afflicted by venereal diseases. Characteristically, the main impediment to the enforcement of the laws was that the interest of the state diverged from those of the state’s officialdom. So while the sex scene thrived throughout much of the city, it did so largely outside the government’s control.
It took about half a century before the Thai government could devise a clever policy that would benefit businessmen and civil servants as well as the state. At first, Sarit Thanarat’s authoritarian regime banned prostitution outright. The ban was only partially relaxed in 1966, so to this day the practice is technically illegal. Subsequently, the Vietnam War and the influx of dollar-bearing American soldiers caused the demand for pretty young women to further skyrocket – multiplying profit-making opportunities for police officers, state officials, and businesspeople – and induced policymakers to look the other way so as not to compromise the torrent of economic aid that good US-Thai relations guaranteed. At the end of the war, the departure of US troops threatened to bring the whole party to a sudden, screeching close. But that was never going to happen.
The government figured that, yes, the same infrastructure of hotels, restaurants, bars, and brothels that made things so comfortable in Thailand for American servicemen could accommodate scores of restless Western warriors who had no wars to fight – that is, if they only knew about the laxity of the country’s laws, the submissiveness of its people, and the looseness of its women. It is at this point that the Thai government began to forcefully promote tourism – “Welcome to the Land of Smiles!” – by portraying its women as eager to satisfy a visitor’s every desire and its population at large as a mass of slobbering fools eager to share wives, sisters, and daughters, all the while smiling meekly, with any white man so kind as to make it down here to spend a few bucks. The results were spectacular. Some studies suggest that the influx of foreign tourists grew from a paltry 80,000 in 1960 to a staggering 3 million people 25 years thereafter. The beauty is that everyone who matters benefits. Brothel owners prosper. The police has a steady source of revenue to compensate for its chronic underfunding. Legitimate businesses flourish as sideshows around the main attraction – lining in gold the pockets of many an aristocrat, state official, and general. And the remittences that flow copiously out of Bangkok and into the countryside have long kept taxes low for the emerging Thai bourgeoisie.
* * *
For every miscreant who descends upon Thailand, weighted down by the oversized baggage of smugness Westerners carry with them everywhere they go, there are thousands of enablers in this country. These enablers benefit – of course, some more directly and more bounteously than others – from the Farang Juice Company’s sustained cropdusting of Thailand in imported, protein-rich fertilizer. They have a deal, you see. It is an unspoken one, but it is as iron-clad as any contract you could sign in this country. And, thus far, successive generations have seen it fit to honor it. All the urbane elites are asked to do to is refrain from making too big a stink about the wide availability of plebeian girls. So long as they don’t do a damn thing about it, in return they get to publicly berate the white man’s shocking behavior, bemoan his influence on the ignorant, impressionable little people (whom they have always argued in need of guidance from the civilized urbanites), and thus proudly wear the mantle of strenuous defenders of Thailand’s national identity. All the while, behind closed doors, millions of their own men engage in much the same behavior. As an added bonus, the money generated by tourism makes businesses more prosperous, jobs more remunerative, and taxes less burdensome.
For the elites, the great thing about it is that while the few thousand Baht that families upcountry receive from their daughters keeps them afloat and hence mutes the clamor for a more interventionist role of the state, in the absence of real economic development millions of provincial bores never go far beyond mere survival. Incidentally, though sufficiency is all the elites and the local press say provincial Thais should aspire to, the continuing reality of rural poverty perpetuates the incentive structure that makes prostitution the best possible career choice for upcountry girls by the hundreds of thousands. You can force people into mere sufficiency, but it is quite another thing to permanently extinguish any yearning for self-advancement and forever sear upon their faces idiotic smiles of contentment.
It is in this light, I believe, that one should read the recent (albeit now effectively defunct) debate over the legalization of prostitution in Thailand. It is questionable whether Westerners have much to gain from the decriminalization of the trade as well as its increased regulation. Prostitutes could hardly be more widely or more openly available. At the same time, in an effort to keep the authorities’ attention elsewhere, most go-go bars and brothels patronized by Western tourists have, by their own initiative, taken aggressive steps to make the girls disease-free. Each “entertainer” and “special service” girl submits to monthly HIV tests and by-weekly gynecological inspections.
Legalization, in this sense, would change only one thing. Not only would the licensing and registration requirements put an official imprimatur on today’s much disputed, unofficial estimates, thus bursting the illusion nurtured by the middle and upper classes that they live in a culture of sexual modesty and conservativeness. The fact that all of that would be legally allowed to happen on the watch of the self-righteous bourgeoisie would render them co-responsible for the phenomenon – knocking them off the pedestal reserved for stalwart cultural warriors. Unsurprisingly, the opposition to the proposal that Thailand allow de jure what had de facto been encouraged for decades was framed precisely around the need to defend Thainess and its values – as if to formally prohibit something you are informally promoting would do anything to affirm Thai morality. Then again, that was the whole point. The law as it stands has no effect of tourism revenue streams so long as it is not enforced. And if the veneer of cultural purism comes at no cost whatsoever, why would the Bangkok elites discard it – and hence volunteer to be seen wallowing in feces with all manners of Western swine?
* * *
If Thailand is really up “for sale,” then, who exactly is selling the country away? At least on this count, it was certainly neither Thaksin nor his minions in the TRT/PPP. It was rather the same kind of unelected military government the PAD now wants to restore that transformed vast swaths of this proud country into a degenerate open-air bordello. All of this for the economic benefit, and with the enthusiastic support, of the very same social class that now forms the hard core of the PAD’s base. This, in the eyes of the urban elites (including my otherwise thoughtful, mild-mannered acquaintance), doesn’t count as putting Thailand up for sale. But what to make of a government that shifts its attention away from the “blue blood jet set” and attends instead to the mass of poor farmers and slum dwellers? That, of course, is called treason.
__________
PS: This is a blog post, not a work of academic scholarship. Hence, I did not weigh it down with references as I would have done with an academic paper. Though the overall take/spin/interpretation offered here is mine, however, it goes without saying that the facts reported come from a plethora of sources I should not fail to acknowledge. Among them:
Loos,T. 2002. Subject Siam. Cornell University Press.
Baker and Pasuk. 2005. A History of Thailand. Cambridge University Press.
Jeffrey, L.A. 2002. Sex and Borders. Univ. of British Columbia Press.
Barmé, S. 2006. Woman, Man, Bangkok. Silkworm Books
Baker, Dhiravat, Van der Kraan, and Wyatt. 2005. Van Vliet’s Siam. Silkworm Books.
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This is a fabulous and very witty commentary on the inner structure of one aspect of Thailand’s prosperity.
Prostitution of course exists in almost all countries, witness the 200 page photo books of available “Escorts” handed out to every tourist in Las Vegas or the 50 page ad supplements at the back of every What’s On guide in almost every large city or even the pages devoted to Escort and Massage ads in the Yellow Pages of the world’s largest telephone companies (or moving on to the Muslim world, the pre-packaged two week bride business organized for Gulf Arabs in Hydrabad, India, etc. etc.)
Each country’s cultural and historical matrix influences and shapes how the commercial sex business is packaged and handled as well as where the revenues end up, and, in this manner, the Thailand situation is particularly revealing of how things are organized in Thailand and who ultimately benefits.
Excellent perspective here. Time constraints prevent me from quibbling with some of your particulars, but it seems to me that it takes a good, hard look at some of the local responsibility involved in Thailand’s current, very seamy reputation.
Chris, the difference between the “Escorts” section in, say, Spokane, Washington, and the “nightlife” scene in Bangkok is, hundreds of thousands of tourists don’t fly in just to pay for sex. (I’ll grant you Las Vegas may be something of an exception.) They certainly do here.
Interesting article!!!.. in particular the way how it put`s the issue of prostitution into the context of the contemporary political debate and the power relations between the elitist urban centre vs. the rural periphery.!!
About “Thailand for sale” I just want to add that one must not forget it is not only “provincial Thai girls” sold by shady Thai businessman and their henchman but to a large extent also “female bodies” imported from neighbouring countries (Burma, China, Laos) and even from central Asia and Europe (Slovak, Czech Republic, Poland). Needless to say, as every business, sex business in Thailand is no more a mere national business with supply from within and demand from outside the country, but a globalised one…..
Some facts taken from:
http://www.catwinternational.org/factbook/Thailand.php
“Twenty years ago, Thailand was in the forefront as a sending country for trafficked women. Thailand has now become a destination country, receiving women from Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and the Czech and Slovak Republics, South America. (CATW – Asia Pacific, Trafficking in Women and Prostitution in the Asia Pacific)
Women from Burma’s Shan state and China’s southern province of Yunnan constitute 16% of the 77,000 women in the sex industry in Thailand. (Kritaya Archavanitkul, Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, The Passage of Women in Neighbouring Countries Into the Sex Trade in Thailand, “Academic urges action in war against flesh trade,” Yindee Lertcharoenchok, Mukdawan Sakboon, The Nation, 28 May 1997)
…Russian females, supplied by prostitution rings in Pattaya and Bangkok, have become a common sight since 1994. Although no one knows their exact number, some estimate there are at least 20 in Pattaya and hundreds flying in and out upon orders given mostly by wealthy Thai men. (”Pattaya: Murder, prostitution and tourists,” Bangkok Post, 22 April 1998)”
http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/4792
“Most of the time, male labor migrants seek easy money in the Near Abroad, in Kazakhstan and Russia, while young girls and women, by contrast, earn their bread in the Far Abroad. Their route usually leads to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey or Thailand. The Ministry of Internal Affairs statistics account as many as a thousand Uzbek girls smuggled abroad for commercial prostitution annually.”
see also: Uzbek Trafficking Victims in Thailand: http://www.humantrafficking.org/updates/664
Quote: “…Bangkok’s bourgeoisie, however, turned out to be not that different from its European counterpart. That they increasingly identified with liberal ideals of equality and freedom – and grounded their virtually unanimous condemnation of polygamy in Enlightenment ideas – does not mean they really practiced monogamy themselves…..”
: Like u said, while many Thai men pretend to practise monogamy, i think many Thai men nowadays do not view extramarital relationship as a betrayal of their wives or lovers. Also, visiting a prostitute could be seen as a part of social activities for Thai men. Unless wives and Thai women in general become less tolerant (or better, condemn) this sort of practice by men, cheating on one’s wives or lovers will remain a ‘normal activity’ among mainstream Thai men.i think Thai women need to be empowered so that they could have more say on the issue of highly unequal gender/sexual relations in contemporary Thailand.
But mainstream middle-class Thai men are so resistant and hostile to changes and criticism when unequal gender relations are concerned. As a Thai woman, I feel this really frustrating and infuriating. For them sexist practice is seen as normal, and anyone who dares to think differently is seen as a trouble-maker. At first I myself didn’t believe it until I witness with my own eyes and ears that Thai men who are married see patronage of sex workers or semi-commercial sexual relations as something so normal, even an intrinsic part of conversation among male friends!And they have little sympathy or respect for women who have to sell themselves. I remember once a Thai guy jokes abt paying just 3000 baht a month for a young and beautiful Burmese migrant to be his maid (read mistress) and later on he jokingly advertised for other friends who might be keen to ‘buy’ the girl from him.!!Isn’t this horrible?? And when someone criticised this sort of highly insensitive ‘joke’, she is accused of taking this ‘joke’ too ’seriously’!!!
Follow the link and see if u wouldn’t be shocked and angry by the ‘conservative and hypocrite’ sexual/gender norms in Thai society: http://www.rcthai.net/forum/showthread.php?t=244049
The site is meant to be a meeting point for men who enjoy RC toys—a sort of hobby ,and it is highly popular with perhaps around 15,000 members who actively post and discuss things. Their major form of entertainment in this ‘General Discussion/lifestyle Section’ is largely through posting this sort of thread. Look how Thai men treat women . These men are largely middle-class with relatively high-income and presumably have quite ‘good’ education. The heading(in Thai) says(roughly translated) “Help save the life of buffaloes and cows because these creatures have done lots of help to human beings”. First picture is that of cows but look at the following pictures. The purpose of this post is meant to be something for fun but as a woman I find this extremely insensitive (to put it mildly). These men compare these girls to creatures (like cows or bulls) which should be ‘saved’ by them (perhaps through their ‘patronage’). NONE of the comments in this thread(or in other thread of the same kind) criticize this kind of horrible post. Everyone feels it’s such an excellent joke and they mostly say they are willing to be ‘patrons’ , accompanied by lascivious words which show how these men enjoy such a display of ‘sexy bodies’! By the way, I guess in Thai, these girls are referred to as ‘Coyotes” and the word for cow in Thai is “CO’ so these jerks feels that it’s such a witty joke that they can make a link between these ‘coyote’ girls to ‘cows” who must be ‘saved’ by Thai men like them!
The comments shown on threads like this show that these Thai men are in fact ‘masturbating openly and collectively in public’ I have no doubt why Thailand’s prostitution problem can never be solved. It is because highly insensitive practice is seen as normal by so many Thai men!!! (who presumably have tertiary education as well!!) .. so people who want to challenge the hypocrisy and conservatism of Thai sexual norms really do need to challenge this sort of ‘normal’ behaviour on the part of Thai men.
Good essay, my only quibble is that I think you exaggerate the overall importance of the American GI in the sex industry. My feeling is that the American military never made up more than 5% (in dollar terms) of the industry. Sure, when the GI’s pulled out in 1976, the industry in the immediate vicinity of the bases suffered briefly, but the vast majority of the industry catered to Thais, not to foreigners. Same thing with the sale of underage/child prostitutes — the vast majority is for Thais, not for foreign pedophiles. Note, by the way, that I use the present tense there.
Great article… right on point… keep up the good work…
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