by Peter Church
By the turn of the century, the country had turned a corner and entered a recovery stage, winning praise from the IMF. In 2003 Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced that the government had made the final repayment of an IMF emergency loan package negotiated in 1998. By then, Thailand's prospects again seemed buoyant, with annual growth averaging 5 percent, despite short‐term setbacks caused by declines in tourist numbers as a result of the regional outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, avian influenza (bird flu) in 2004, and, most tragically, the consequences of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, in which 5,300 Thais and tourists died in the south. The effects of the political convulsions of 2006–08, combined with the global economic downturn of 2008–09, had impacted negatively on growth levels as foreign investors and tourists reevaluate Thailand as a preferred destination. Foreign investment reached nearly US$10 billion and the tourism industry was valued at US$16 billion at its height in 2007. Both figures have since plunged sharply under prolonged military rule with foreign investment falling by 78 percent in 2015. Recent bombings in popular tourist spots like Bangkok, Phuket, and Hua Hin in 2016 have also dented the tourism industry considerably.
Serious social problems remain to be addressed. They include the perpetuation of a dual economy in which most industrial development is focused on the capital, which accounts for over 50 percent of the nation's GDP although it has only an estimated 15 percent of the population. Bangkok's infrastructure is straining to cope with the expansion but, despite major development schemes, rural infrastructure remains inadequate to attract much business and industry away from the capital. Pollution and environmental degradation have become urgent issues in both urban and rural areas. AIDS has become the country's most pressing health issue, with several million Thais estimated to be HIV‐positive; though, due to campaigns by government and nongovernmental organisations, AIDS‐awareness among young Thais is now among the highest in the developing world and the problem does seem to be under control. The drug problem also created international headlines when, in February 2003, the government launched a “war on drugs.” Unprecedented in its severity, an estimated 3,000 people were killed within the first three months, mostly by overzealous police. While the campaign met with overwhelming public support, in December 2003 the late King publicly chastised Thaksin over the number of extra‐judicial killings and called for an investigation. The Philippines' new president, Rodrigo “Rody” Roa Duterte, seems to have copied Thaksin's approach where there is a current wave of extra‐judicial killings of suspected drug dealers by police, the military, and vigilante groups.
In 2003, separatist violence broke out in the three Malay‐Muslim‐dominated southern states of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat, resulting in martial law being imposed. The violence worsened in April 2004 when the police killed 107 alleged militants after being tipped off about planned attacks. In December 2004, 78 Thai Muslims who were detained following a protest rally suffocated to death in military custody, an event which sparked strong international condemnation of the government. Though peace talks between the rebels and the government have progressed, the security situation remains uncertain in the south with both sides accused by human rights groups of committing abuses.
Despite these problems, Thailand's history over the centuries tends to induce optimism for its future, albeit the political developments over the last five years have caused considerable damage to the peace and structure of the country. So far, however, Thai history can be read as the story of a people with an unusual capacity for social cohesion, for resolving or evading conflict, and for confronting unavoidable challenges creatively.
1On December 1, Crown Prince Maha ascended to the throne as King Rama X. However the coronation will only take place some time in 2017 following the cremation of his father.
11
Vietnam
The Vietnamese were ruled by the Chinese for over a thousand years, from the 2nd century BC until the 10th century AD. After winning their independence, the Vietnamese continued looking to China as their cultural model, their prime source of concepts of government, social organisation, and the arts. Culturally, Vietnam thus belonged to the Confucian world of East Asia, which distinguished it sharply from neighbouring states with Theravada Buddhist or Islamic cultures. The difference in cultural outlook between Vietnam and her South‐East Asian neighbours has long contributed to conflict in the region.
But the Vietnamese regard for China also made for conflict within Vietnam itself. It proved difficult to reconcile with another Vietnamese impulse—to protect their distinctive character as a people and to uphold uniquely Vietnamese cultural traditions. Whether to adopt or to resist Chinese ideas became a perennial source of social and cultural stress within Vietnam's ruling class, and also between ruling class and people.
The Vietnamese state was an expanding one, which only intensified such cultural stresses though it took 700 years. The expansion, known as the “march to the south,” eased the country's population pressures and made Vietnam a major power in South‐East Asia. But it also bred deep regional differences and rivalries within Vietnamese society. Vietnam in the 19th century was in poor shape to face the challenges posed by the West's political, economic, and cultural expansion.
The Western impact, in the shape of French colonial rule and subsequent American intervention, aggravated the historic tensions and also cut bitter new divisions in Vietnamese society. Communism in Vietnam, as in China, won wide popular support, with its promise of national independence and a reintegrated and just society. It delivered on the first promise; it failed on the second. As in China, communism in Vietnam as an overarching state ideology now drifts uncertainly, though most observers are optimistic about the future of Vietnam's 94 million people living in a state under Communist Party control but with a free‐enterprise economy.
EARLY HISTORY
The earliest Vietnamese state occupied only the Red River Delta, today the heart of northern Vietnam. In the second century BC this state was absorbed into the empire of Han‐dynasty China, the Chinese calling it Nan‐yüeh or Nan‐viet. Thus began over 1,000 years of Chinese rule, during which the Vietnamese became familiar with Chinese political and social institutions, the Chinese writing system, and Chinese learning and arts.
They were also influenced by the Mahayana forms of Buddhism then flourishing in East Asia, another factor which would set them apart from their neighbours in South‐East Asia amongst whom Hinduism and subsequently Theravada Buddhism flourished. Mahayana Buddhism tended to blend with Confucian and Taoist thought and, in Vietnam, with local popular religious folklore and beliefs. It never developed the strong institutional networks of temples and monasteries which gave considerable political strength to Theravada Buddhism.
The highwater mark of Chinese influence upon the Vietnamese was probably reached during the T'ang dynasty (618–907 AD), whose rulers termed the country of the Vietnamese “An‐nan,” or “Annam” (“the pacified South”). The Vietnamese, however, never lost their sense of separate identity. In 939 AD, they took advantage of political disorder in China to seize their independence and reestablish a Vietnamese state. In later centuries, the Chinese attempted on several occasions to reassert their authority—leading to a Vietnamese perception of themselves as a permanently threatened nation—but they were successfully resisted. The early Ming did manage to take and hold Vietnam for 20 years (1407–1428) but were ousted by forces led by one of Vietnam's greatest heroes, Le Loi, the founder of the Le dynasty, which was to last from 1428 until 1789.
The history of Vietnam after independence in the 10th century would be marked by two principal, and conflict‐provoking, tendencies. The first of these was the development of a Confucian state and high culture modelled on China. By the 15th century, Vietnam had a system of government similar in all but size to that of its mighty northern neighbour. The Vietnamese emperor, at the capital, Hanoi, presided over a mandarin bureaucracy educated in the Confucian classics. Law, admi
nistrative structures, literature, and the arts all followed Chinese forms. The educated class also tended to prefer to use Chinese rather than the Vietnamese language. In theory, the adoption of the Confucian model of social organisation should have conferred enlightened government on Vietnam. In practice, it produced a ruling class culturally alienated from their subjects. This problem was compounded by the grip on the country's commercial life maintained by Chinese merchants allied with the Vietnamese ruling class.
Nevertheless, popular Vietnamese culture absorbed many attitudes and values of Chinese derivation, through acceptance of codes of law and morality promulgated by government and spread by scholars. Thus, ordinary Vietnamese displayed such characteristically Confucian traits as respect for hierarchy, emphasis on an individual's social obligations, intense family loyalty, and reverence for education and scholarship. Even so, Vietnamese popular culture always remained self‐consciously distinct, hostile to China and wary of the country's Sinophile upper class.
The second main tendency in the history of Vietnam after it gained independence from China was southward expansion, and this would compound the cultural tensions. Military in organisation, the expansion was driven basically by the need to find farming land for a growing population. Between the 11th and 17th centuries it gradually extinguished the kingdom of Champa, in what today is central Vietnam. It then took the Mekong Delta from the Khmers and during the 19th century would probably have overwhelmed the whole of Cambodia had not the Thais challenged the Vietnamese advance and the French brought it to a halt by establishing a “protectorate” over Cambodia in 1863.
The “march to the south” allowed rival power blocs to develop within Vietnamese society and the 16th century saw intermittent civil war in Vietnam. In the 17th century the country was split between two powerful clans: the Trinh in the north and the Nguyen in the south. The frontier established between them was only a few kilometres from the site of the demilitarised zone which would separate North and South Vietnam from 1954 until 1975. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Nguyen rulers in the south became responsible for the country's continued expansion.
The cultural differences between northerners and southerners popularly recognised in modern Vietnam may have their origins in the “march to the south.” The circumstances of the “frontier” southerners contrasted with those of “stay‐at‐home” northerners. In the south, settler families were thrown on their own resources in a tropical environment unlike that of the temperate north. Deference toward officialdom declined. Village organisation of economic and administrative matters—elaborate in the north—also declined in the south. On the southern frontier, facilities for the reinforcement of Confucian culture were virtually nonexistent. At the same time, the southern settlers were encountering alternative ideas, particularly religious concepts, in the cultures of the Chams, the Khmers, and upland tribal (montagnard) groups. Here perhaps were the beginnings of the cultural dichotomies popularly perceived today. Northerners are noted for their conservatism, deference to the group, reserved manners, and respect for the intellectual life, southerners for their outgoing approach to life, freewheeling attitudes toward authority, outspoken manners, and eclectic religious life.
Whatever the developing differences, the Vietnamese perception of themselves as being fundamentally one people remained unquestioned. This was dramatically demonstrated in the Tay Son Rebellion which broke out in Vietnam in 1771. A vast “revolution from below,” the rebellion swept away the Nguyen and Trinh regimes which had divided Vietnam, and removed what was by that stage a nominal Le imperial dynasty. The rebels also repelled a Chinese invasion, and turned on Chinese merchants in Vietnam. They faltered only when faced with the tasks of practical government. A member of the southern Nguyen clan, Nguyen Anh, raised forces and, by 1802, managed to subdue the rebel forces. He became the emperor Gia Long, first of Vietnam's Nguyen emperors and the first ruler to preside over a united Vietnam for more than two centuries.
THE 19TH‐CENTURY CONFUCIAN REVIVAL
Emperor from 1802 to 1820, Gia Long recognised what an administrative and defence nightmare Vietnam's geography had become—two fertile deltas, 1,000 kilometres apart, connected by a narrow coastal corridor. Ignoring Hanoi (and thus incurring northerner resentment), he established his capital in the centre of the country, at Hué. There he built a palace complex that was a scaled‐down replica of Peking's Forbidden City. The symbolism was appropriate—Gia Long and his son, Minh Mang (emperor from 1820 to 1841), would attempt to establish in Vietnam the most thorough copy yet seen of Chinese administrative concepts and methods. Though honourably intentioned, the attempt would prove a disaster.
From the 1830s onward, rebellion flared frequently in protest at the level of bureaucratic intervention in daily life, at the rigidities and absurdities of mandarinal decrees, and above all at the level of taxation demanded by the system. The renewed concern with Confucian models also diminished the ability of Nguyen imperial government to deal realistically with the growing challenges from the West. Some members of the Vietnamese scholar class recognised the need to study the West, but they were in the minority. Disastrously, Emperor Minh Mang and his successors (Thieu Tri, emperor 1841–47, and Tu Duc, emperor 1847–83) chose to confront and repress the religion of the West, Christianity.
French Catholic missionaries had been active in Vietnam since the mid‐17th century. They had helped Gia Long defeat the Tay Son rebels and establish his imperial dynasty, assisting him with men and resources. By the mid‐19th century there were an estimated 450,000 Catholic converts in Vietnam. Vietnamese government had always been wary of organised religion in any form, seeing it as a potential threat to Confucian authority, and now Christianity seemed to present a serious challenge. In successive campaigns of repression, thousands of Christians and their priests were killed and Christian villages were levelled. The persecutions shocked Catholics in France, and unwittingly provided a pretext for French intervention in Vietnam.
COLONIAL HISTORY
In 1859, a French naval expedition seized Saigon, following an unsuccessful attempt on the then‐more‐significant port of Da Nang, which was close to Hué. Emperor Tu Duc faced rebellion in the north and, in 1862, conceded to the French, who gained by treaty Saigon and its three surrounding provinces. In 1869 the French seized three further adjoining provinces, thus completing the territory of the colony they would call Cochin China.
The French conquered the remainder of Vietnam between 1883 and 1885, in the course of a complicated conflict in the country's north. The north had collapsed in chaos fomented by both Vietnamese and expatriate Chinese rebels. The Vietnamese imperial government had lost all capacity to control events. Both China and France regarded Vietnam as being within their respective spheres of influence and sent forces, with the French eventually repelling the Chinese.
The French then declared “protectorates” over northern Vietnam (Tonkin) and central Vietnam (Annam), where they would retain a line of puppet Nguyen emperors until 1926. In 1885, some Vietnamese mandarins, outraged at the French intrusion, organised a resistance movement called Can Vuong (“Aid the King”), which would persist for several years. After it was pacified, the French would rule relatively securely until 1940.
French colonial rule would bring many elements of modernity to the country, amongst them handsome cities with sewers and electric lighting, the Saigon–Hanoi railway, modern port facilities, a network of metalled roads, and modern education and medicine for those—a small minority—who could afford them. Under the French, the city's rice output was greatly expanded and Vietnam linked into the world economy on the basis of exports of rice and, to a lesser extent, rubber and other products. Colonialism's most significant impact, however, was to increase divisiveness in Vietnam, administratively, economically, and socially.
Administratively, “Vietnam” disappeared off the map. The country was divided into Cochin China, Annam, and Tonkin, whose administrative centres were Saigon, Hué, and Hanoi,
respectively. This had the effect of outraging Vietnamese nationalists and enhancing regionalist tendencies. The three segments became parts of French Indochina, along with Cambodia and Laos. Differing approaches to administration north and south also seemed to encourage regionalism. Cochin China, constitutionally a French colony, experienced French administrators and French legal forms. Saigon became the leading and most Westernised city of Indochina, an alluring showpiece of modern fashions and culture. In the “protectorates” Tonkin and Annam, by contrast, the French endeavoured to retain indigenous administrative and legal systems, if only for the sake of reducing costs. As a result, Hanoi and Hué remained much quieter places than Saigon.
Colonial economic policies also pulled the country apart, though the fundamental reasons for this lay in the circumstances inherited by the French. In Vietnam's north, the French found a readymade economic crisis—a densely crowded population dependent on subsistence rice agriculture. By 1929, the average population density in the countryside of the Tonkin Delta would be 975 per square kilometres. The whole system depended on an elaborate but ancient and dilapidated complex of irrigation dykes. Most families held inadequately small plots and were in debt. The French were unwilling to industrialise in Vietnam—industry was for metropolitan France, not for her colonies—and thus had no fundamental answers to these problems. By the 1930s only about 120,000 people were classified as industrial workers in Vietnam, many of these being miners in the north's coal, zinc, and tin mines. Some northerners moved to the south's rubber plantations as indentured labour, often in scandalously exploitative conditions, but this labour traffic had little impact on the north's basic economic problems.
