Neither Rebels nor Dupes: The New Politics of Thai Peasants
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Since Thailand’s coup of September 2006, which forced the controversial government of billionaire businessman Thaksin Shinawatra out of office, pro- and anti-Thaksin forces have waged an intense battle for control of the government. Rural people in Thailand have played an important role in this struggle, but the nature of their politics is poorly understood. On the one hand there are breathless accounts of agrarian class struggle, while on the other hand rural protest is dismissed as the product of elite manipulation and financial inducement. These paradigms are unhelpful because they ignored the emergence of a new political relationship between the state and the rural population. Sustained economic growth since the 1960s had lifted rural households to levels of income and consumption previously unimagined. They are no longer mainly challenged by food insecurity but by the need to diversify economically and improve productivity. The state plays a key role in addressing these challenges through an array of subsidy, welfare, and community development schemes. Modern peasant politics in Thailand are motivated not by an antagonistic relationship with the state but by a desire to draw the state into mutually beneficial transactions. The classic frameworks for explaining peasant political behavior, based on rebellion or resistance, are impediments to understanding this new style of political behavior. Prof. Walker will propose instead an alternative model of rural “political society” based on the relationship between a persistent peasantry and a subsidizing state. Copies of Thailand's Political Peasants will be available for signing and sale by the author following his talk.
Andrew Walker is an anthropologist who has worked in northern Thailand since the early 1990s. His latest book is Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (2012). His many earlier publications include “Royal Succession and the Evolution of Thai Democracy,” in Montesano et al., eds, Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand (2011); Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Mainland Southeast Asia (edited, 2009); Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand (co-authored, 2008); and The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma (1999). He also co-founded and co-convenes New Mandala, a widely read and highly regarded blog that offers fresh perspectives, both analytic and anecdotal, on mainland Southeast Asia.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Andrew Walker
Deputy Dean, College of Asia and the Pacific
Speaker
The Australian National University
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Reforming Higher Education: Meeting the Challenges of Global Competition in the Digital Information Age
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Education has provided the critical foundation for Asia’s rapid economic growth. However, in an increasingly globalized and digital world, higher education faces an array of new challenges. While the current strengths and weaknesses of educational systems across Asia differ considerably, they share many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas.
The fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue examined challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education in Asia. At its core, the challenge facing every country is how to cultivate relatively immobile assets—national populations—to capture increasingly mobile jobs with transforming skill requirements. This raises fundamental questions about skills needed for fast-paced change, domestic inequality, the role of government, and choices of resource allocations.
Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford University and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012, to discuss questions that address vital themes related to Asia’s higher education systems. These included:
- Can higher education meet the challenges of economic transformations?
As skill requirements change with the increasing use of IT tools that enable manufacturing and service tasks to be broken apart and moved around, how can higher education systems cope? How can education systems address the increasing need for global coordination across languages and cultures? How can countries deal with demographic challenges, with developed countries facing overcapacity and developing countries with younger populations facing an undercapacity of educational resources?
- How are higher education systems globalizing?
What are the strategies for the globalization of higher education itself? How are universities positioning themselves to attract top talent from around the world, and what are their relative successes in achieving this? What are the considerations when building university campuses abroad? Conversely, what are the issues surrounding allowing foreign universities to build within one’s own country?
- How can higher education play a greater role in innovation?
What is the interplay between private and public institutions and research funding across countries, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing each? What is the role of national champion research initiatives? For developed East Asian countries, a focus on producing engineers raised the economic base, but many are discovering that they are still not at the leading edge of innovation. What are ways to address this dilemma? For developing countries, the challenge is how to improve basic education from the level of training basic factory workers to creating knowledge workers. How might this be accomplished? Is there room for a liberal arts college model?
- What are the challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education?
What are effective ways of overcoming organizational inertia, policy impediments, and political processes that hinder reform? What are the debates and issues surrounding ownership, governance, and financing of higher education?
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.
Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.
The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.
Kyoto International Community House Event Hall
2-1 Torii-cho, Awataguchi,
Sakyo-ku Kyoto, 606-8536
JAPAN
Seminars
Seminar series to examine the experience of Asia's Muslim minorities
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A new Shorenstein APARC event series will explore the complex ties between identity and the social, political, and economic status of Asia's Muslim minorities, with a focus on China, India, the Philippines, and Thailand.
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An elderly Uighur woman in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang, Sept. 2010.
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Understanding Muslim Minorities in Asia - The Inter-relationship of Socio-economic Status, Identity, and Politics
The objective of this seminar series is to explain the forces and factors behind the persistent decline in the social, political, and economic status of many Muslim minorities in Asia—including in China, India, the Philippines, and Thailand. Along with the socio-economic decline is a narrowing of identity among citizens who are Muslims to often a purely religious identity. This contrasts with the more pluralistic identity that reflects their real heterogeneity by class, gender, and other socio-economic characteristics.
Discourses of Defiance: Framing Muslim Self-Determination in Thailand and the Philippines
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Using the concept of framing, this presentation will explore discourses behind the move for greater self-determination on the part of the Malay-Muslims of southern Thailand and the Moro of the southern Philippines. It will discuss the shifting referents of ethnic identity and demonstrate how coherent narratives of resistance have taken shape over time and against changing social, political, and economic contexts to frame the collective action of resistance movements over the last four decades.
Joseph Chinyong Liow's research interests are in Muslim politics in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Muslim Resistance in Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines: Religion, Ideology, Politics (East-West Center, 2006); Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (Oxford, 2009); and Islamic Education in Southern Thailand: Tradition and Transformation (ISEAS, 2009). He is also co-editor of Islam in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2010). Liow is currently working on two single-author book manuscripts. The first is on social movement theory and armed ethnonationalist movements in Southeast Asia, and the second is a revised edition of the Dictionary of Modern Politics in Southeast Asia, previously authored by the late Michael Leifer.
This seminar series is co-sponsored by the South Asia Initiative,
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Philippines Conference Room
Joseph Chinyong Liow
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
616 Serra St C302-23
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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jcliow@stanford.edu
Autumn Quarter 2011 Visiting Scholar
Joseph Chinyong Liow is a professor of comparative and international politics and an associate dean at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
His research interests encompass Muslim politics in Southeast Asia and the international politics of the Asia-Pacific region. During his time at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Liow will conduct research and writing on social movement theory and armed resistance in Southeast Asia, as well as a dictionary of modern politics of Southeast Asia.
Liow is the author of Islam, Reform, and Education in Southern Thailand: Tradition and Transformation (2009); Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (2009); and the Politics of Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: One Kin, Two Nations (2005). He is also editor of Islam in Southeast Asia, Four Volumes (2010); co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Security Studies (2010); and co-author of Confronting Ghosts: Unpacking Southern Thailand’s Shapeless Insurgency (2010) and the East Asia Summit and Regional Security (2010). Liow is a co-editor of the Asian Security Book Series at Routledge, sits on the editorial board of South East Asia Research, and serves on the editorial team of Asian Security.
Liow holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MSc in strategic studies from the Nanyang Technological University, and a BA (Hons) in political science from the University of Madison-Wisconsin.
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Political Inheritance and Hybrid Democracy: Family Politics and Democracy in Thailand
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Political Inheritance and Hybrid Democracy: Family Politics and Democracy in Thailand
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In 2011 Yingluck Shinawatra became the 1st female prime minister of Thailand, the 3rd member of her family to become prime minister, and the 13th member of her extended family to gain a seat in parliament. Scholarship on family politics in advanced democracies has been scarce, perhaps because family politics are quasi-aristocratic and therefore do not align with the egalitarianism that informs democratic principles. What literature does exist tends to treat family politics in terms of political inheritance or occupational following, and as a legacy of the past that is certain to wane with modernization. When it comes to new democracies, in contrast, scholarship has been more abundant and has treated family politics in terms of corruption, “bossism,” hybridism, and closed games. Professor Ockey will discuss these differences and present some preliminary findings on the scope and nature of family politics in Thailand, drawing on a database of elected members of parliament since the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932.
Jim Ockey is associate professor (reader) and coordinator in the Department of Political Science at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is an expert on Southeast Asian politics, with a particular focus on democratization in Thailand.
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James Ockey
2012 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow, APARC
Speaker
Stanford University
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Understanding the complexities of China's global interactions
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Since opening its doors to the world in 1978, China has pursued a sometimes erratic but reasonably steady course leading to increasing global economic and political interaction. Its interests now extend from Pyongyang to New York and Sydney to Riyadh. U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement of a new “pivot” toward Asia, recent events on the Korean Peninsula, and China’s upcoming leadership transition provide additional reasons to seek greater understanding of China’s goals and interactions with other nations.
Thomas Fingar, Stanford’s Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow, is leading a new multiphase Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) initiative to explore the nuances and complexity of China’s foreign relations and domestic issues. The China and the World research project aims to contextualize and better understand China’s regional and global interactions, both from the perspective of China itself and from that of other countries. Beginning with Northeast Asia, the project will analyze China’s relations region-by-region throughout the world, and will involve experts from Stanford, China, and the regions studied. It kicks off with a Shorenstein APARC-organized workshop held Mar. 19 and 20 at the new Stanford Center at Peking University.
Fingar discusses the development of China’s foreign relations since 1978, and describes the project and workshop’s background.
In the three decades since Deng Xiaoping enacted his 1978 Open Door reforms, what have been the main trends in China’s global engagement?
The general trend since 1978 has been for China to become increasingly active and engaged in a growing number of places around the world. There have been a number of phases to this.
The “honeymoon period” of U.S.-China relations (1979–1989) was a period of essentially no competition to China’s interaction within the U.S.-led world economic system. China concentrated on the OECD countries—especially the United States, Japan, and Western Europe—that had money to invest and willingness to trade.
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, China’s international options became more constrained as its relations with the developed world plateaued. It began to reach out to the places that would deal with it: Southeast Asia and particularly Africa. This was in part diplomatically motivated, and in part a search for new markets for the low-end goods it was beginning to produce. It was also the beginning of its search for energy.
Around 2000, China transitioned from building a more modern economy towards being one—beginning the era of its “rise.” China’s demand for resources went up, as did its capacity to supply more markets and its ability to invest more of its growing foreign exchange earnings. It became globally active, proclaiming that it had a new, less exploitative model than what the United States and Europe offered.
What Northeast Asia issues do you think China will focus on this year, especially as it plans for a major leadership transition?
North Korea’s stability and China’s growing investments in the DPRK. Beijing is acutely interested in whether Kim Jong Un will prove a viable leader and whether the regime will be able to manage its new challenges. China is concerned about possible North Korean provocations that might trigger responses by South Korea and/or the United States, putting at risk the peaceful regional and international situation China needs for its political and economic development.
The second issue is answering the question: what does the U.S. pivot toward Asia mean? What does it mean in terms of security, economics, and relations with Japan and Korea? China is the largest trading partner for each of these countries. They value it as a market, and as a source of resources. Yet they also worry about being excessively dependent on China. They appear not to have worried about this quite so much when their dependence on the U.S. market was comparable.
Two full workshop sessions will be devoted to Japan and South Korea, both countries with close U.S. ties. What are the most important factors with regard to China’s rise for these two countries? What about for Southeast Asia?
One of the reasons for our upcoming Beijing workshop is to develop a general template of questions we can ask for each region. We want to avoid focusing the questions too narrowly on Northeast Asia.
For Japan and Korea, one factor has to do with economic opportunities and with their own vulnerabilities. The other has to do with the security challenges of China’s rise, and the uncertainty of its military aspirations. Japan and Korea do not want to be drawn into U.S.-led activities, but they still value the United States for protection. They are concerned about managing the decoupling of economic and security dependence, about no longer being dependent on the same country for both.
Many regional issues are interrelated, such as maritime territorial claims and naval expansion. China is an economic player in Southeast Asia, and the Philippines and Thailand have an alliance with the United States. Indonesia is a rising county in Southeast Asia, and India is an outside player in the region. The U.S. 7th Fleet currently defends the shipping lanes to Northeast Asia that go through Southeast Asia, which probably is not the long-term solution.
Russia played an important role in shaping the political ideology in the early days of the People’s Republic of China, and the politics of both countries—especially Russia—have changed so much. What is their relationship like now?
Correct and limited. The West imposed a military hardware embargo on China after Tiananmen, so Russia is a limited alternative for that, and it is also a source of energy and other resources. It is fair to say China has something close to disdain for Russia, for what it sees as political confusion and economic mismanagement. The idea of a strategic triangle—using Russia to balance U.S. influence—is something China sees as unviable.
As you move forward with this project, what is the ultimate goal?
The goal is to understand the dynamics of interaction—to understand the bigger picture. Other countries have objectives and concerns with regard to China, while China has objectives and concerns of its own. It is about identifying things such as where they see the same and different kinds of opportunities; what concerns they have about third country interests or involvement; and how they evaluate the success of policies to date.
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"Focus straight ahead on the development of Pudong [Shanghai commercial district]," says Deng Xiaoping on a poster at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
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James Ockey
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
616 Serra St., Encina Hall E310
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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jsockey@stanford.edu
Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia
James Ockey is the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, and will be at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) from January through March in 2012.
He is currently the coordinator of political science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he is an associate professor (reader).
Ockey’s research interests cover many aspects of Thai politics, including democratization, civil-military relations, electoral politics, and political conflict. While at Shorenstein APARC he will be working on the manuscript for a book project, tentatively titled Trakun Kanmuang: Family Politics in Thailand. The book will analyze patterns of family relationships in the Thai parliament, outline the role of provincial political families in promoting or inhibiting the democratization process at local and national levels, and explore the place of political families in the social structures of provincial Thailand.
Ockey earned an MA and PhD in government at Cornell University, and a BA in political science from Brigham Young University.