Thailand

Pavin Chachavalpongpun is associate professor at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies.  The crackdown on Thai protesters at dawn on October 15 brought an abrupt end to overnight demonstrations focused on constitutional reforms and the military, which witnessed violent clashes and the disruption of the royal motorcade. The protests and counterprotests heightened the tension on both sides of the increasingly polarized and dangerous political divide in Thailand. The government announced a state of emergency in Bangkok, exercising absolute control over civil liberty. For now, assembly in public with more than five people is illegal, though protesters continue to flout these restrictions. At the crackdown on October 15, the government employed security forces to disperse the crowds. Core leaders of the protests were detained, including the lawyer-turns-activist Anon Numpa, raising the question whether these arrests could serve to abort future protests.  Early in the protest, an organized group of yellow shirts, or royalist, counterprotests moved toward the protesters near the Democracy Monument and set about systematically provoking the pro-democracy protesters. This led to violent confrontations. Moreover, several hundred state officials, clad in yellow t-shirts with blue scarves, were seemingly deployed at the protest venue, in an attempt to provide a counterweight to the demonstrators for reform. Their closely cropped haircuts and yellow costumes signified that these state officials likely were part of groups of royal volunteers technically helmed by King Vajiralongkorn.  The peak of the protest was reached when a royal motorcade transporting Queen Suthida cut through the wave of demonstrators, alerting the authorities of her security in the midst of angry crowds. Surprised that the route of the motorcade had taken this direction, instead of avoiding demonstrations, the protesters took the opportunity to yell at the Queen, “Our tax! Our tax! Our tax!”—suggesting anger that Thai taxes were being used to pay for the royal family’s lavish lifestyle. This was the first time, since the end of the absolute monarchy, that the revered royal family had received such hostile treatment from demonstrators, in such a public way. The protesters confronted the motorcade even though the Thai monarchy is protected under the draconian lèse-majesté law, which forbids any insults towards the king and queen.  The state of emergency has left no casualties, as protesters were agreeable in terminating their activities. Yet the position of the government right from the start of protests was firm; there would be no compromise. This position suggests that, if demonstrations continue in Thailand, in violation of the ban, a tougher crackdown could be coming. Last Friday, according to the New York Times, authorities “sprayed demonstrators with water cannons and sent rows of riot police officers at them, forcing a retreat. More than 20 protest leaders have been arrested.” Two of the protest leaders were charged on Friday in a manner that could potentially result in their being imprisoned for life.  Yet again over the weekend, protesters continued to mass in Bangkok, defying the ban. Indeed, protests spread to other parts of the country, suggesting they are unlikely to die out on their own any time soon. By organizing on social media and in other ways harder for the authorities to track, the protesters have been able to continue rallying. King Vajiralongkorn has stayed silent through this series of protests, even as demonstrators demand monarchical reform. The silence of the king could be read like a silent order that he wishes the authorities to deal harshly with the demonstrations, and has no interest in directly interacting with the protestors and hearing their complaints. And now that core leaders of the protests are in custody, the authorities are ramping up their suppression of demonstrators, and the possibility of life imprisonment has been mooted, it seems hard to imagine where this movement goes from here. Some protesters had counted on the pro-democracy oppositions parties in the country to take their demand forward for serious parliamentary debate about reforms. It is evident, however, that these parties fear the repercussions of such action. They do not want to be perceived as anti-monarchists and are unlikely to bring such discussions to the floor of parliament. 

In recent days, protests and counterprotests in Thailand have pushed the country closer to dangerous conflict between pro-democracy demonstrators, who also increasingly have called for monarchical reforms, and the royalist military and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, himself a former general who launched the 2014 coup in the kingdom. Protests have been building for months, and have shifted from just focusing on constitutional reforms and calls for a new election to demanding reforms of the monarchy, which historically has been a taboo subject in Thailand and protected by lèse majesté laws. Despite regular arrests of protest leaders, the demonstrations show no signs of abating. In recent days, the standoff has become much more serious. Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn lives primarily in Germany but recently returned to Thailand, as the German government warned him not to be conducting state business from Germany. On Wednesday, protestors gathered in downtown Bangkok, confronting military and police and counterprotests. The demonstrators are infuriated by the king’s growing influence over Thai politics, the military, and Crown Property Bureau funds, his unwillingness to actually live in Thailand, and his often-chaotic personal lifestyle. In fact, the king is so much more willing to openly wield power than his predecessor father, and as a result he has made himself more open to public criticism. The situation remained mostly calm, but when the motorcade of Queen Suthida traveled down a main road this week in the capital, following a ceremony at the Grand Palace, it was confronted by protestors waving the three-finger Hunger Games sign, now a symbol of protest in Thailand. They heckled the royal motorcade, making fun of the royals’ lavish, and state-supported, lifestyle, although there was no effort to commit violence by the demonstrators. Still, open heckling of royals shows how far Thailand has come, in just months, to abandoning the taboo about critiquing the monarchy—and directly showed the monarchs, from inside their cars, the anger of some Thais. (The demonstrators say they did not intend to hinder the royal motorcade, although the government says they did.) Still, even though the protests had not swelled into violence, the government cracked down hard by Thursday morning Thailand time, declaring a severe state of emergency. The state of emergency bans gatherings of more than five people, and the government also arrested multiple protest leaders. Now, the potential for real violence looms. Protestors continue to turn out in the streets, on Thursday defying the government’s orders not to gather in large numbers in public. The authorities arrested more protestors, but they do not seem to have stopped the demonstrators’ willingness to assemble. So far, the authorities have not resorted to measures like those used against demonstrators in 1976, 1992, and 2010—shooting demonstrators and committing other bloody acts. But this remains a real possibility.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun is associate professor at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. After weeks of reformist protests in Bangkok and other parts of the country, Thailand’s demonstrators, who initially focused on a broad range of issues including investigations of disappeared Thai activists and constitutional reform, have come to focus more intently on reforming the monarchy, a longstanding taboo in the kingdom. Last weekend’s protest, which took place on September 19 and 20, was organized in part to remember the coup of September 19, 2006 that overthrew the elected government. However, the demonstrations, which reportedly drew as many as thirty thousand people, making them the largest in Thailand since the 2014 coup, were clearly not primarily to commemorate 2006: They were focused on the present day. And while the protestors did still make a range of demands, including rewriting the constitution and asking the current government, midwifed by the 2014 coup-makers, to step down, they also called for immediate reform of the monarchy. On Saturday, in a highly unusual event in Thailand, protestors openly spoke about the climate of fear surrounding discussions of the monarchy, discussed the disappearances in exile of critics of the royal palace, and called for change. Indeed, the demand for immediate monarchical reform is now an official objective of the protesters, and more and more demonstrators have spoken up about the monarchy. Given the immense power of the monarchy, built partly upon its intricate ties with the military but also on decades of laws protecting the palace and on links between the palace and many prominent Thai businesses, such an objective is indeed an arduous task. It also probably is quite dangerous. For now, some demonstrators are simply trying to end limits on discussion about the monarchy, which is somewhat still protected under lèse-majesté laws—though they also clearly want the monarchy to operate under real, constitutional limits. Open discussions like those on Saturday night are designed to break down taboos. And on Sunday, the student leaders of the protests launched a ceremony, embedding a new plaque onto the surface of Sanam Luang, near the Grand Palace. The original plaque that had been there was made by the People’s Party, a group that abolished the absolute monarchy in what was then Siam in 1932. But that older plaque mysteriously vanished in 2017. So, the new plaque was designed to symbolize a reclamation of popular political rights. “At this place, the people have expressed their will that this country belongs to the people and is not the property of the monarchy, as they have deceived us,” the plaque read. By the next morning, the plaque was missing. Initially the student leaders also planned to move the crowd to the Government House to hand over a letter with demands for monarchical reform. But they instead decided to pass on the letter to General Surayud Chulanond, president of the Privy Council, an advisory body to the king. Surayud, a former prime minister, was trusted by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, and is an important ally of the monarchy. The showdown took place in front of the Privy Council Office. For a brief moment, many feared that it could lead to violent confrontation. Eventually, a high-ranking police officer, as a representative, agreed to take the letter from a protest leader to deliver to Surayud. Where will the protest movement go from here? Parit Chiwarak, a leader of the demonstrations, called for another protest on October 14; this time the date coincides with the massacre of students from Thammasat University in 1973. Other protest leaders have suggested calling a demonstration for September 24, Meanwhile, Parit suggested a number of efforts designed to diminish the royal symbols in everyday life in Thailand. For example, he suggested that people raise three fingers, the Hunger Games symbol that has caught on in Thailand as a symbol of protest, every time they listen to the national anthem, or blow their horns when they are stuck in the traffic because of the royal motorcade, or withdraw money from Siam Commercial Bank, of which King Maha Vajiralongkorn is the largest shareholder. Parit told demonstrators, “Get all your money out [of Siam Commercial Bank] and burn your bank book.” It is true that publicly demanding reform of the monarchy is an impressive achievement in itself, given the taboo nature of the topic and potential harsh penalties for criticism of the monarchy. The demonstrations have led to rising awareness of the politicization of the monarchy. Yet, the long-term consequences of this political activism are still unknown. It is clear that the demonstrations will continue in the coming months; there is no sign that they are winding down. But there will likely be a harsh response. Many demonstrators already have been charged with sedition. And in the past, prolonged demonstrations that touched on the monarchy were met with deadly force.

In recent months, Thai students and other activists have staged a series of escalating protests. The demonstrations initially focused on demands for constitutional change and new elections, after last year’s vote was conducted in an unfair environment. The protestors also called for an objective investigation into the apparent abductions and murders of Thai dissidents living abroad, mostly in mainland Southeast Asia. In recent years, Thai dissidents living in Laos have turned up dead, disemboweled in the Mekong River with their bodies filled with cement, or have simply vanished. But as the protests have grown in size and spread across the country, reaching universities and secondary schools and other locales in smaller towns across the kingdom, the demonstrators’ demands increasingly have focused on greater transparency in and reform of the monarchy. Yet despite the monarchical taboo, and the real threat of punishment—several were arrested in late August, and royalists held a counterrally—they continue to push.  Indeed, the possibility for discussion and even reform of the monarchy in Thailand seems greater now than at any time in decades. But the potential for a violent crackdown also seems greater than at any time since the bloodshed of 2010, when at least ninety-one people were killed. For more on the potential implications of the protests, see our new article in World Politics Review.

Hunter Marston is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. His research focuses on great power competition in Southeast Asia. According to recent surveys of Southeast Asia, China is now the most influential strategic and political power in the region. Yet China’s rise has been so rapid and consequential that few book-length studies have captured the complexity of Beijing’s expanding regional influence. The new book by Murray Hiebert of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Bower Group Asia, Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia's China Challenge, fills this gap and shows in significant detail how Southeast Asian states are responding to China’s rise. Given his decades working in the region as a foreign correspondent and political analyst, Hiebert is well-suited for this challenge, and the result offers valuable insights on issues related to Southeast Asia, China, and broader rivalries in the region. The book portrays a region riven by a diversity of views toward China; this diversity prevents any unified response to China’s growing influence over Southeast Asia. As Hiebert shows, Southeast Asian states are of two minds regarding China: on the one hand, they are deeply dependent on China’s rise for their own economic growth and keen to continue trade with Beijing. On the other hand, they are increasingly nervous about China’s growing economic, diplomatic, and military power, its more assertive diplomacy, and its willingness to use its might unilaterally to get its way in the South China Sea—and potentially other parts of the region as well. Hiebert punctures several myths about the China-Southeast Asia relationship. For one, although media reports often portray mainland Southeast Asian states as close to China, or even as satellite states of Beijing, Hiebert offers a different view. He suggests, with considerably detailed country case studies, that mainland Southeast Asian states are not so easy to pigeonhole. China has constructed innumerable dams upstream on the Mekong, choking off much-needed water as countries down river face droughts as a result of climate change. At the same time, Chinese companies—in joint ventures with Southeast Asian corporations in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia—are building massive hydropower projects on the lower Mekong, leading to increased salt water flooding and environmental degradation. These dams have badly damaged the Mekong’s flow and often stopped the seasonal flow of rich nutrients essential to the cultivation of rice and other crops, and the fish which feed the populations of Southeast Asia. In so doing, they have angered many residents of mainland Southeast Asian states, even though governments like Cambodia and Laos and Myanmar remain highly dependent on Chinese aid, investment, and diplomatic support. Hiebert also gives ample coverage to the depth of nationalism within modern Myanmar, and how it is facile to say that Myanmar also has become some kind of satellite state of China. There is enormous resistance within Myanmar toward China’s proposed Myitsone Dam in Kachin State, which the previous government of President Thein Sein suspended in 2011 due to popular pressures. At the same time, China has covertly supported ethnic insurgents on Myanmar’s northern periphery, sometimes providing arms and munitions, a reality that has not gone unnoticed by Myanmar’s military, which views dependency on China as a “national emergency.” In addition, Hiebert shows that Southeast Asian hedging strategies, playing for time and keeping their options open, provides some grounds for believing that the region will not be totally dominated by Beijing. The ambiguity of Southeast Asian loyalties means that Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states have not made up their minds to side with Beijing. Hiebert argues that many of these states—even Cambodia and Laos, which seem to have less leverage to resist China’s influence and cash—will continue to avoid making stark choices. Malaysia also likely will continue to hedge. It has generally failed to respond to China’s provocations in the South China Sea or has done so quietly, believing that its “special relationship” would protect it from the bullying tactics to which China has subjected Vietnam and the Philippines. However, Hiebert notes Kuala Lumpur’s missile tests in July 2019, after China deployed a Coast Guard vessel near Luconia Shoal on Malaysia’s continental shelf. Later that year, Kuala Lumpur submitted claims to an extended continental shelf in that area to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. In fact, Hiebert’s account leaves open the possibility that Malaysia is standing up to China more often than it appears to outsiders. Indonesian President Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, visited China four times during his first five years in office and has solicited major Chinese investment, even as Jakarta has pushed back against Beijing’s increased assertiveness in the North Natuna Sea. Indonesia’s economic dependence on China imposes limits to Jokowi’s willingness to stand up to China, but even he has often pursued a hedging strategy. The book also provides an even-keeled examination of Washington’s regional treaty allies Thailand and the Philippines, frequently described as tilting toward Beijing. Hiebert makes a compelling case that Thailand is still hedging against China, despite prevailing counterarguments regarding Thai foreign policy. Of the Philippines, he notes, “It is far from certain that Duterte’s sharp pivot toward China marks a long-term Philippine trend.” Interestingly, Hiebert predicts that Manila will swing back to an anti-China foreign policy after Duterte’s term ends in 2022 and a future administration in Manila seeks to rebalance relations with the regional powers. Second, Hiebert makes a compelling case that ASEAN should stop competing amongst itself and enhance cooperation, especially by strengthening dialogue on how to deal with China. As Hiebert points out, the main obstacle to deeper cooperation is the fact that Southeast Asian states often have varying levels of threat perceptions toward China and also often have different needs from the United States, the other major regional power along with Japan. Vietnam, for instance, has in recent years deepened its security cooperation with the United States, allowing a U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, to dock at Danang for a week in 2018, for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War. There also has been speculation that Hanoi may file legal arbitration against Beijing’s maritime claims, and Hanoi has fostered military-to-military cooperation with Washington in other ways as well. Cambodia, on the other hand, has been all too willing to support Beijing’s interests. Under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of Prime Minister Hun Sen, Beijing has often facilitated China’s goals in Southeast Asia, dividing ASEAN. As Hiebert makes clear, Beijing knows how to cater its aid to Phnom Penh’s needs based on Western actions such as sanctions in response to unfair elections. Still, many Cambodians remain wary of China’s expanding influence in their country. Numerous Cambodians resent Hun Sen’s reliance on Chinese investment, which has transformed Sihanoukville into a Chinese outpost and may grant Beijing a naval base in the country. Sophal Ear, a political scientist at Occidental College, also warns about the risks of taking on unsustainable levels of Chinese debt: in 2018 roughly 48 percent of Cambodia’s $7.6 billion foreign debt was owed to China. Finally, Hiebert turns to the question of what all this regional complexity means for Washington, which has displayed a mixture of heavy-handed demands for regional fealty and ambivalence toward Southeast Asia. The Trump administration’s reduced interaction with the region has fed a perception in Southeast Asia of Washington’s declining influence. Hiebert provides a strong case for why and how the United States should restore its attention to the region and refocus its strategy toward Southeast Asia., including by regularly attending regional summits and increasing funding for much-needed physical infrastructure, including in the Mekong basin countries.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun is associate professor at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. A coalition of Thai youths, students and political activists has launched a series of protests since mid-July 2020. Over the weekend, the demonstrations swelled to the largest street protests in the kingdom since a coup six years ago, with some ten thousand protestors gathered around the Democracy Monument in Bangkok. When protests first started, their requests appeared to target solely the government. They called for the dissolution of parliament (so that fresh elections would be organized), amendments to the constitution and an investigation into the cases of abduction and killing of Thai dissidents outside of the kingdom. Many chanted “down with dictatorship” and gave the Hunger Games three-finger salute. In recent years, at least nine Thai dissidents living outside the country have been disappeared, with several of them turning up dead in a gruesome fashion. The weekend protests went off mostly peacefully, even though protesting is technically illegal under a current state of emergency. But the kingdom’s long history of brutal crackdowns on protest leaves cause for concern about a potentially violent eventual response, if demonstrations continue and possibly grow in size and forcefulness.  The protests also have been driven by rising anger at the Thai military—the current government, though elected, is dominated by a pro-military party and led by former junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha—and at the country’s febrile economy. In particular, although the government has had an effective record at containing COVID-19, with one of the lowest case counts and death tolls in Asia, political opponents have grown angry that the government has maintained a tough state of emergency, and some quarantines, while allowing the armed forces to disregard quarantine. (In fact, the kingdom’s success at battling COVID-19 has made it more feasible to hold street protests, with demonstrators having less fear that they will spread the virus by marching, chanting, and gathering.) And, even though the Thai government has handled COVID-19 well, the kingdom’s tourism and trade–dependent economy has been battered. The Thai economy shrank by 12.2 percent in the second quarter 0f the year, its worst downturn since the time of the Asian financial crisis. The severe downturn, combined with Thailand’s persistently high inequality and still-rigid economic and social hierarchies—it is one of the most unequal countries in the world—animates opposition, especially among younger people graduating from university, struggling to find work, and rebelling against traditional hierarchies.  But the protests also, increasingly, have come to focus on the monarchy, normally a taboo subject, in part because of harsh lèse-majesté laws the criminalize criticism of the king and other senior royals—laws that have been wielded repeatedly to jail and silence Thais. In this way, the protests are astounding—there has not been such a direct and public challenge to the Thai monarchy in decades. The demonstrators, as the New York Times reported, gathered and “raised their hands in defiance below a giant image of the king dressed in coronation regalia.” Demonstrators have held signs saying “No god, no kings, only man.” Some protestors have openly called for changes to the monarchy, while many student demonstrators have urged Thais to seriously address issues with the monarchy that have long affected their lives. On Twitter in Thailand, Thai hashtags that essentially mean “Why Do We Need a King” have circulated. One of the core leaders, Arnon Numpa, a young lawyer-turned-activist, repeatedly has called for an immediate reform of the monarchical institution, arguing that the king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, has bolstered his power through different channels. For several decades now, the supposedly constitutional monarchy of Thailand has often proven to extend its powers beyond constitutional norms and rules. Under the reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej (1946-2016), the monarchy intervened in politics, playing a role in sanctioning the overthrow of several civilian governments, while also using a network of allies to regularly wield power behind the scenes in Thailand. But the former king enjoyed a significant degree of reverence among Thais; his son, current King Maha Vajiralongkorn does not. Since the ascendance to the throne of King Vajiralongkorn, it has been evident that he has sought to augment his power, politically and financially. King Vajiralongkorn also could be seen to have paid little heed to the effects of COVID-19; he travels back and forth to Thailand frequently from Germany.  To increase pressure for change, several of the protest groups have proposed multiple demands, mostly regarding the role and responsibility of the monarchy. Some of their demands are rather radical in the context of Thailand. They have called for:  Creating a division between the personal property of the king and the Crown Property Bureau (CPB). In 2018, King Vajiralongkorn took sole possession of the CPB, worth some U.S. $30 billion. An end to the palace intervening in politics. Thailand has had the most coups of any country in Southeast Asia—and by some measures of any country in the world. The current king has forged closed ties with the military. Nullifying the order that permitted the transfer of military units to the direct command of the royal palace.  Ending state propaganda related to the monarchy. Investigating the deaths in exile of anti-monarchy activists.  The government and the palace so far have offered no signs of listening to demonstrators’ requests. It is unlikely that the government, or indeed the king, will give in the demands. Despite the mostly peaceful nature of the standoff so far, a number of students and activists have been arrested, charged and released on bail, including Parit Chiwarak, a Thammasat University student. And ultimately, given Thailand’s history and the strong views of Thai monarchists and the power of the military, the prospect of violence in Bangkok is very real.

With the exception of Thailand, the five countries of mainland Southeast Asia are some of the poorest in the Asia-Pacific region. According to the World Bank, Cambodia has a per capita GDP of around $1,600, while Myanmar’s is roughly $1,400. Laos and Vietnam fare only marginally better, each at around $2,500. Their political systems run the gamut from semi-democracies to authoritarian one-party states. Yet despite some initial missteps, they have all largely suppressed COVID-19, proving far more effective in addressing the pandemic than most developed countries, including the United States. Vietnam, a country of roughly 95 million people, has reported a handful of deaths and only 784 total cases, as of Sunday. It has seen a recent surge, centered on the coastal city of Da Nang, but even that outbreak remains small by global comparison. Its neighbors have done nearly as well. Thailand, which has a population of just under 70 million, has not had locally transmitted cases in weeks, and only around 3,300 cases in total. Many aspects of life are returning to normal in the capital, Bangkok, and in other parts of the kingdom. By comparison, Florida, with a population of around 21 million people, has recently been averaging about 6,600 new cases per day. Cambodia, meanwhile, has had only around 200 confirmed cases, and is even allowing in Americans, a risk few countries are willing to take right now. Laos and Myanmar have had only 20 and 358 confirmed cases, respectively. While the real number of cases is likely higher in all of these countries, their performance still stands out as a bright spot in the global fight against the coronavirus. Many of their maritime Southeast Asian neighbors, particularly the Philippines and Indonesia, are struggling with high caseloads. Few observers predicted mainland Southeast Asia’s success against COVID-19. Back in February, I criticized the region’s initial response to the pandemic; even several months later, I did not imagine how effective these countries would be in containing the virus. While Vietnam quickly responded to COVID-19 with border closures, lockdowns and a major public health campaign, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia were slow to stop all travel to and from China, the initial source of the epidemic, and some of their officials shared misinformation about the virus. Thailand, however, soon righted its approach. It imposed a state of emergency in late March, and launched a national task force to combat COVID-19. While the Thai government has used the state of emergency to suppress dissent—authorities arrested multiple opposition activists last week—it also appears to have helped slow the virus’s spread. Moreover, early lockdowns in Vietnam and Thailand probably helped smaller countries in the region like Cambodia, which did not impose restrictions quickly but may have benefited from having fewer travelers from its neighbors. More recently, mainland Southeast Asian countries have been world leaders in getting near-universal compliance with mask wearing, in many cases very early in the pandemic. At least 95 percent of Thais and 94 percent of Vietnamese wear masks in public. In some cases, like Vietnam, this is because the government imposes tough fines on anyone not wearing a mask in public. Other states have relied more on longstanding social norms promoting the use of face masks when sick. Countries in the region, even the repressive ones, have also displayed impressive levels of transparency about COVID-19 and the government response—even while they stifle dissent and limit the flow of information about topics other than the virus. In Vietnam, where the ruling Communist Party controls all aspects of political life, the Ministry of Health is putting case information online. Laos has embarked on a national public information campaign that is extremely transparent by the standards of one of the most autocratic one-party states in the world. To be sure, Vietnam’s response has built on years of “efforts to improve governance and central-local government policy coordination,” as Edmund Malesky and Trang Nguyen note in a recent report for the Brookings Institution. Many governments in mainland Southeast Asia have also worked to ensure that their coronavirus response measures impose minimal financial costs on their populations—critical moves to getting broad public buy-in. As Nguyen and Malesky note, Vietnam’s policy is to cover most costs for citizens related to the response to COVID-19, including quarantines, coronavirus tests and hospitalizations. Cambodia, in turn, has relied on aid from the World Bank and other overseas entities to help ensure that people are not opting out of COVID-19 restrictions due to an inability to bear the cost. Some of these strategies should be replicable in other developing countries, given enough political will. Masks are cheap and effective, and many other states could copy the combination of pressure and skillful public campaigns to get as many people to wear masks. Other hybrid or authoritarian states would do well to heed Vietnam’s example, which has shown that transparency about COVID-19 doesn’t necessarily endanger the state’s dominance over politics. In other words, if they come clean with their publics about the spread of COVID-19 and their responses to it, they are not necessarily setting themselves up for a broader political backlash. Likewise, other developing countries may be able to copy efforts from mainland Southeast Asia to ensure that COVID-19 quarantines and treatment remain free or highly inexpensive, which is the best way to get people to take tests, isolate and go for treatment. Beyond these clear strategies, some residents of the region, including several medical researchers, have suggested that mainland Southeast Asia may have benefited from unique cultural practices that make contagion less likely. For instance, many people in mainland Southeast Asia do not greet each other with handshakes or hugs, but instead with a palms-pressed-together gesture, while standing apart from the other person. Taweesin Visanuyothin, the COVID-19 spokesperson for Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, told the New York Times that Thailand’s success “has to do with culture. Thai people do not have body contact when we greet each other.” However, in large, packed cities like Bangkok, Yangon and Ho Chi Minh City, people walk close together, jam into buses and other public transportation, and generally come quite close to each other. They may greet each other without body contact, but the sheer size of these places makes it hard to practice real social distancing. Thus, the true reasons for these countries’ success in containing the virus likely have more to do with their policy responses. Other researchers speculate that some people in mainland Southeast Asia may have some natural immunity to COVID-19. In one study from southern Thailand, more than 90 percent of people who tested positive for COVID-19 remained asymptomatic, a much higher share than normal. The reasons for this finding, however, remain unclear. One thing that is certain is that Thailand and its neighbors, which have had experience fighting other infectious diseases like SARS and dengue fever, have collectively emerged as a rare pocket of resilience in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. As similarly low-to-middle-income countries in Latin America are hit hard by the coronavirus, and nations across Africa brace for a surge in cases, their governments could benefit from looking eastward and taking lessons from mainland Southeast Asia’s response.

With the exception of Thailand, the five countries of mainland Southeast Asia are some of the poorest in the Asia-Pacific region. According to the World Bank, Cambodia has a per capita GDP of around $1,500, while Myanmar’s is roughly $1,300. Laos and Vietnam fare only marginally better, each at just over $2,500. Their political systems run the gamut from semi-democracies to authoritarian one-party states. Yet they effectively suppressed COVID-19, proving far more effective in addressing the pandemic than most developed countries, including the United States. For more on why mainland Southeast Asia has had such success, see my new World Politics Review article.

Last weekend in Thailand, protestors demanding changes in the Thai constitution, new elections, an end to harassment of activists and other government critics, the reduction of the role of the army in politics, and other major changes rallied in Bangkok. Around 2,500 people gathered in the Thai capital, and smaller groups gathered in other cities in Thailand, in the first major public protest since COVID-19 hit the country. Some of the demonstrators followed up, earlier this week, with smaller protests at army headquarters and other sites, to criticize the government’s harsh approach to dissent and opposition political voices. The protests may signal the return of some degree of the angry and contested street politics that had erupted in Thailand late last year, after Thailand’s pro-military party, relying on a constitution midwifed by the armed forces, put together a coalition to control parliament after last year’s elections. Despite the elections, opponents of the government continued to insist—with a fair amount of credibility—that the election had not been fair, and they turned out sizable numbers for demonstrations in Bangkok late last year. The opposition’s anger only grew when, in February and before Thailand really had to grapple with COVID-19, the country’s top court dissolved a leading opposition party, Future Forward. The decision banned Future Forward’s top leaders from politics for ten years. COVID-19, however, slammed a door on street actions, and the Thai government—like many governments in Southeast Asia—also utilized the pandemic to restrict Thais’ freedoms and amass more power. To be sure, after initial missteps in addressing the virus, the Thai government’s public health response has been exemplary. The government has overseen near-universal adoption of face masks, has bolstered the country’s already-strong public health system, and has instituted relatively tough lockdown measures months back, and in a more organized way than neighboring states like Indonesia. Thailand, a country of roughly 70 million, has had only around 3,200 total confirmed COVID-19 cases and 58 deaths, and it has not had locally-transmitted cases of COVID-19 in weeks. (Florida, with a population of around 21.5 million people, had 9,440 new cases in one day earlier this week.) At the same time, though, the Thai government has utilized the pandemic to declare a state of emergency. The emergency may have been medically necessary, but Bangkok also has banned public assembly, cracked down on the news media, arrested activists who criticize the government, and prosecuted social media users who criticize the government as well. With Thailand returning to a kind of normality, the demonstrators are testing whether they can push the country to its pre-pandemic political status—and challenge whether the government can claim to be so successful in fighting COVID-19 while also needing the state of emergency and to maintain total control over demonstrations and other types of dissent. Last year, before Future Forward was banned, popular anger had been building against the Thai government, which seemed relatively shaky. What’s more, the Thai protestors may be setting an example for other opposition movements in Southeast Asia, where in countries like Cambodia and Malaysia governments also have used the pandemic to amass more powers—yet at the same time have largely contained COVID-19. But if the Thai government, which recently extended the state of emergency, cracks down hard on the demonstrators, filing charges against leaders and possibly taking even tougher measures, it may show that Thailand has moved into an even more repressive phase of politics than it inhabited last year.

Last week, Thailand’s constitutional court dissolved the Future Forward Party, a powerful opposition group in a country that has just emerged from five years of military rule. The court also banned the party’s executives, including its leader, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, from participating in politics for the next decade. For more on the implications of the dissolution, see my new CFR In Brief.

Thailand could be headed toward unrest after the disbandment of Future Forward Party, an opposition group popular among young people.

Over the weekend, Thailand suffered a horrific mass shooting, in the northeastern city of Nakhon Ratchasima, known as Korat. A gunman apparently angered about a land dispute attacked his commanding officer, the officer’s mother-in-law, and another person. He then seized ammunition and powerful weapons from his army camp, grabbed an army vehicle, and shot soldiers who tried to stop him. He drove to the Terminal 21 shopping mall in Korat, fired randomly at people on the streets and then entered the mall and embarked upon a prolonged rampage against civilians inside. After around seventeen hours, commandos killed the gunman. The bloodshed was Thailand’s worst-ever mass shooting by an individual. Thirty people were dead, including the killer, and at least fifty-seven injured. I have lived in and traveled back and forth to Thailand for two decades, and while the kingdom has had many tragically violent incidents—army massacres of civilians in 1992 and 2010, among other military killings—and the country has the second highest gun homicide rate in Southeast Asia, I cannot remember a mass shooting like this in Thailand. It was one that seemed so sadly familiar to shootings that have taken place in recent years in countries from New Zealand to the United States to France. Indeed, the Thai shooter’s motivations might have been different from those of the Christchurch gunman, the killer at the El Paso Walmart, or other lone gunmen, but the style of action was horrendously similar. The Thai gunman killed innocents at will, and he seemingly wanted to glorify his activities by streaming his murders live on Facebook, before the platform pulled down his profile. Yet Facebook waited around five hours to take down the gunman’s profile, a long time lag. The rampage also raised several other questions. Some Thais criticized the prime minister and other cabinet members for their seeming inability to console the country, instead seeming more focused on inserting themselves the news coverage. It also was a reminder than even though the Royal Thai Army is the dominant institution in the kingdom, has ruled politics directly or indirectly for many years, and has boosted its budget in recent years, it often seems unable to securely store its weapons. (It also, as the Associated Press reported, had to rely on “a journalist, a drone operator for a local TV news channel” to help find the gunman after the security forces could not locate his position in the mall). In Thailand’s south, insurgents have broken into Royal Thai Army weapons depots and stolen caches of arms, some of which they then use against army soldiers. James Buchanan, a PhD candidate at the Department of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong, notes that in 2004 about four hundred rifles were stolen from an army depot in Narathiwat, in the south, and in 2010 about six thousand rifles, as well as explosives, were stolen from an army base in Phatthalung. These were just a few of the cases of weapons being pilfered. And here again, in the Thai northeast, the shooter was able to get weapons at an army outpost before heading into Korat to kill. Facing a shocked populace and scorn on social media and in the press for the army’s poor security protocols, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has now ordered a review of the security of Thai armories, admitting poor security of military weapons made the massacre worse. A few weeks before the massacre, the Thai army commander had given a media interview in which he said he had ordered all units to protect their weapons—although he seemingly meant protect them from political opponents of the military, not the army itself. General Apirat Kongsompong, in that interview, told the Bangkok Post that “All weapons must be kept under good care and ready for use … The army will never let ill-minded people steal them.” After the massacre, army spokesman Winthai Suvaree told reporters that the incident was “unprecedented.” Indeed, this style of mass shooting was unprecedented in the kingdom, but the army’s lax control of its own weapons was not.

The coronavirus which originated in Wuhan, China, continues to spread around the globe. New cases are being discovered every day. This past week, the first domestically transmitted cases were reported in Japan, in the United States and in Germany. New cases also recently emerged in Singapore, the Philippines, India and other countries. In light of those developments, the World Health Organization declared the virus a global emergency and the U.S. State Department warned Americans not to travel to China. The downside of intense China links The nations of Southeast Asia have extensive trade, transport and border links to China. It was thus no surprise that the region was one of the first outside of China and Hong Kong to face coronavirus cases. It is highly probable that no level of regional preparation would have stopped some spread of the virus. Southeast Asia is one of the biggest tourism destinations for Chinese travelers and, because of the Chinese New Year’s holiday, many people had already left Wuhan before the city began to shut down. It certainly did not help that the Chinese authorities were initially slow to release information to other countries. Only Singapore gets the job done But even if the Chinese side had been far more circumspect, the fact remains that several Southeast Asian governments have responded poorly to the spreading pandemic. This, in turn, has raised the risk of larger outbreaks in their countries. In fact, many Southeast Asian governments, with the exception of Singapore, have not responded effectively. Singapore, of course, is not only just a city state, but also very rich by comparison to all its neighbors and has an extensive track record in organized public health campaigns. ASEAN’s poorer cousins Not all of Singapore’s poorer cousins are fully at fault. Some regional states, like Cambodia and Vietnam, have limited public health resources. The areas of mainland Southeast Asia which are near the Chinese border are by their nature very porous when it comes to human flows. Moreover, in some cases like the Myanmar-China border, those places are not even under central government control. As it happens, Myanmar has been lucky to date as it has not yet had a confirmed case, although cases have been confirmed in Cambodia and Vietnam. Authoritarianism vs. public health But caution as to the actual factual situation is warranted. Mainland Southeast Asian states that are authoritarian are not used to sharing information. In fact, the authoritarian governments in mainland Southeast Asia worry that any transparency will spark public anger. Indeed, they are often more afraid of their own publics than of an outbreak of the coronavirus. Understandably enough, their inability to share information, as well as the lack of urgency in putting in place effective control measures, is scaring their citizens. The attempt to engage in information control is also making it more likely that the virus will spread. Under pressure, in order to combat the coronavirus more effectively, Vietnam this week finally took some tougher measures. It shut part of its land border with China and cracked down significantly on tourism from China. The wealthier cousins Even in wealthier Southeast Asian states, the response often has been ineffectual and slow. Indonesian authorities have dragged their feet. The country’s health minister Terawan Agus Putranto affected a strange air of nonchalance about the virus. He told the public, “Don’t be anxious. Just enjoy it” (although he seemed to mean enjoy life, not enjoy the virus). He also reminded Indonesians to pray and to think good thoughts. (At least he also told his fellow Indonesians to wash their hands). Thailand flunks the test But Thailand has been the prime example of a Southeast Asian government flunking the Coronavirus test. The kingdom, whose tourism economy relies heavily on Chinese visitors and whose biggest companies have extensive trade and investment links with China, now has the most cases of the virus of any country other than China. All of these cases are Chinese visitors, but a local outbreak is possible. Thailand moved slowly to shut down links to China, probably for fear of hurting diplomatic ties with Beijing and undermining a lucrative tourism connection. The government also dragged its feet on establishing information centers to teach the Thai people about the virus. It also failed to pass out pertinent information about protection at all. The probable cause for this stance is that, although Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s government is technically democratically elected, it was effectively installed in power by the 2014 coup regime. It thus only has a narrow mandate. Prayuth remains less popular with the public than the leading opposition leader, and his coalition only took control of parliament following extensive irregularities during and after last year’s election. Even with the power of the military behind him, Prayuth’s own coalition remains unwieldy. Self-defeating information policies When it has informed the public, the Thai government often has put out misinformation that confused people or underestimated the virus. Government officials seemed angered that they even had to be transparent about how they were handling the outbreak. The results have been scary. Thai authorities are warning that there could be virus outbreaks in big tourist centers, like Bangkok and Phuket, which would quickly lead to a spike in cases. When Prime Minister Prayuth came down sick earlier this week, his health minister even rushed to assuage concerns that the he had come down with the coronavirus. As the virus spreads, the kingdom’s initial fumble could cost it dearly.

The coronavirus which originated in Wuhan, China, continues to spread around the globe. New cases are being discovered every day. Last week, the first domestically transmitted cases were reported in Japan, in the United States and in Germany. On Sunday, the Philippines reported the first confirmed death from the virus outside of China. The nations of Southeast Asia have extensive trade, transport and border links to China, and the region is a major travel destination for Chinese tourists, particular during Lunar New Year.  It was thus no surprise that the region was one of the first outside of China and Hong Kong to face coronavirus cases. Nonetheless, multiple several Southeast Asian governments have responded poorly to the spreading pandemic. Thailand in particular has bungled the response, but it is hardly unique. These failures, in turn, have raised the risk of larger outbreaks in their countries. For more on my analysis of how Southeast Asian states are responding to the outbreak, see my new piece in the Globalist.