Thaification

A name board on a Buddhist temple in Chiang Mai written in Lanna alphabet (อักษรธรรมล้านนา). The use of this script was discouraged and Lanna language is now written with the Thai alphabet.

Thaification, or Thai-ization is the process by which people of different cultural and ethnic origins living in Thailand become assimilated to the dominant Thai culture, or more precisely, to the culture of the Central Thais.

Thaification was a step in the creation in the 20th century of the Thai nation state where Thai people occupy a dominant position, away from the historically multicultural kingdom of Siam. A related term, Thainess, is held to describe a characteristic that persons and things possess when they are Thai.

Motives

Thaification is a byproduct of the nationalist policies consistently followed by the Thai state after the Siamese coup d'état of 1933. The coup leaders, often said to be inspired by Western ideas of an exclusive nation state, acted more in accordance with their close German nationalist and anti-democratic counterparts (pre-Nazi) to effect kingdom-wide dominance by the Central Thais. The businesses of interspersed minorities, like the traditionally merchant Thai Chinese, were aggressively acquired by the state, which gave preferential contracts to ethnic Thais as well as co collaborative Ethnic Chinese.[1]

Thai identity was mandated and reinforced both in the heartlands and in rural areas. Central Thailand became economically and politically dominant, and Central Thai (differentiated from multi-lingual Siamese) became the state-mandated language of the media, business, education and all state agencies. Central Thai values were successfully inculcated into being perceived as the desirable national values, with increasing proportions of the population identified as Thai. Central Thai culture, being the culture of wealth and status, made it hugely attractive to a once-diverse population seeking to be identified with nationalist unity.

Targets

The main targets of Thaification have been ethnic groups on the edges of the Kingdom of Thailand, geographically and culturally: the Lao of Isan (อีสาน), the hill tribes of the north and west, and the Muslim (มุสลิม) Malay minority of the south.[2][3] There has also been a Thaification of the large immigrant Chinese population.

Policies

Thaification by the government can be separated into three sets of policies:

Rural development

In the first set of policies, the government has targeted specific policies and actions at the fringe groups. An example of this is the Accelerated Rural Development Programme of 1964, the Isan component of which included the strengthening of allegiances with Bangkok and the rest of the country as one of its objectives.

Education

The second set of policies consists of policies applied nationally, but that disproportionately affect the fringe groups. One example of this is the prescribed use of the Thai language in schools. This had little effect on Central Thais or Siamese who already used the language in everyday life, but made bilinguals of speakers of Lao in the north-east, of Kam Mueang (คำเมือง) in the north, and of Yawi (ยาวี) in the south.[4]

Harsher methods were imposed on the Thai Chinese.[5] After the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, a series of anticommunist governments starting with that of dictator Plaek Pibulsonggram sharply reduced Chinese immigration and prohibited all Chinese language secondary schools in Thailand.[6]

Thai Chinese born after the 1950s had "very limited opportunities to enter Chinese schools".[7] Those Thai Chinese who could afford to study overseas studied English instead of Chinese for economic reasons.[8] As a result, the Chinese in Thailand have "almost totally lost the language of their ancestors", and are gradually losing their Chinese identity.[9]

Encouraging Thai nationalism

The third set of policies was designed to encourage Thai nationalism in all the country’s people. Examples include the promotion of the king as a national figurehead, saluting the flag in school and the twice daily broadcasts of the national anthem (Phleng Chat - เพลงชาติ) on radio and television at 8 AM and at 6 PM. Encouraging Thai nationalism had the obvious side effect of discouraging other loyalties, such as that to Laos resulting from Central Thais' perceived threat of Lao cultural and political dominance in the Isan region[10] or that to Melayu (มลายู) in the south.

See also

General:

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Booth, Anne (2007). Colonial Legacies: Economic and Social Development in East and Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press. p. 122.
  2. ↑ Jacques Ivanoff , The Cultural Roots of Violence in Malay Southern Thailand: Comparative Mythology; Soul of Rice, White Lotus.
  3. ↑ Umaiyah Haji Umar , The Assimilation of the Bangkok-Melayu Communities .
  4. ↑ In 2003, the image at left of the 100-baht note was revised to depict King Chulalongkorn in navy uniform and, in the background, abolishing the slave tradition.
  5. ↑ Tong, Chee Kiong; Chan, Kwok Bun (2001). Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand. Brill Publishers. pp. 170–177.
  6. ↑ Tong, Chee Kiong; Chan, Kwok Bun (2001). Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand. Brill Publishers. pp. 170–177.
  7. ↑ Tong, Chee Kiong; Chan, Kwok Bun (2001). Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand. Brill Publishers. pp. 170–177.
  8. ↑ Tong, Chee Kiong; Chan, Kwok Bun (2001). Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand. Brill Publishers. pp. 170–177.
  9. ↑ Tong, Chee Kiong; Chan, Kwok Bun (2001). Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand. Brill Publishers. pp. 170–177.
  10. ↑ Sons of Isan

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Additional reading