A Good Life: Human Rights and Encounters with Modernity
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2. Continuities and crisis Each country, and each group within a country, has undergone its own experience of modernisation. In Thailand, the beginning of this process can be dated to the middle of the nineteenth century and the reign of King Mongkut, followed by that of his son, King Chulalongkorn. Despite turbulent political events over the subsequent century, including the end of constitutional monarchy in 1932 and the growing dominance of rule by the military, the resistance of the country to European colonisation resulted in a totalising discourse privileging continuity and tradition. At the heart of this interpretation were the Thai monarchy and Thai Buddhism.1 Buddhism, the Buddhist concept of the good (bun), and traditional relations and practices, became the prism through which most ordinary Thai people saw their own lives and their society. These accepted views were challenged by the advent of the ‘democratic experiment’ in 1973 and its brutal end in 1976. View from a Bangkok factory At around lunchtime on Wednesday, 6 October 1976, I was sitting on the common verandah area of the women’s dormitory of a Bangkok factory, talking to Nopawan about her family, her growing up, and her school and work experiences in Korat before coming to Bangkok. It was the late monsoon season, still humid, and with the oncoming afternoon downpour remaining fairly predictable. The long verandah area, with the shop at one end, a common TV room at the other, and staircases going up to the sleeping areas on the two floors above, caught what breeze there was. Near us, other young women relaxed and chatted between shifts, prepared food or caught up on their laundry. Khun Phadungcit, the dormitory supervisor—the mee baan—came back and forth from discussing shop business with Lek, who ran it. This largely domestic scene was suddenly interrupted by Ratana, who came running out from the TV room, calling to everyone to come quickly. Something big was happening at Thammasat University. As we looked at the black-and-white television images, it wasn’t clear that what we were seeing was part of a massacre. But it was more than apparent that what was happening was terrible. There were pictures of police with machine guns standing over dozens of students who were lying on the ground, stripped to the waist, with their hands behind their heads. Police were shouting, students 1 The privileging of Buddhism as a key component of national identity ignored, and therefore excluded, non-Buddhists, especially those in the largely Muslim south. 39 A Good Life: Human rights and encounters with modernity were crying out, there was the sound of bullets in the background. Other cameras picked up an individual student being attacked by an angry mob in the Pramane Ground opposite the university. There was mention of other attacks and deaths. The commentary was along the lines that there must have been Vietnamese infiltrators among the students, because dog meat had been found. The commentary seemed to be offered as an excuse for the mob’s behaviour. The factory women watching did not appear to be persuaded, or at least did not indicate agreement, although my attention was not really on them but on what we were seeing. In memory, that moment and those images are overlaid with later knowledge of the extent of the violence and cruelty of that day, and with other images that were smuggled out of the country before the military, yet again, took over the Government in the evening and suppressed all further reporting. As a result, only one afternoon newspaper, Sayamrat, managed to carry photos before they were banned: among others, of a crowd of spectators around several burning bodies; a dead man—later identified as student leader Jaruphong Thongsindhu—being dragged across the soccer field by a piece of cloth around his neck; rows of anonymous corpses. ‘It was a Wednesday morning in which the deaths by gunshot seemed to be the least painful and most civilised of murders’.2 Coverage of the day’s events on the evening television news gave no indication at all of the sadistic horror of what had actually occurred, beyond reporting that there had been ‘further’ incidents at Thammasat University. Nevertheless, as a result of these events, the new National Administrative Reform Council (NARC) had taken control in place of the elected government. Their reason was ‘in order to restore stability and law and order to the kingdom’.3 At the factory, or among its workforce, there was no particular sense of instability or of disorder. The factory was part-owned by a Japanese parent company and run by a Japanese manager along largely Japanese organisational lines. The wages and conditions for its employees were significantly better than in wholly owned Thai factories. Its workforce had not felt the need to participate in any of the many strikes since the beginning of the ‘democratic experiment’ in October 1973. This included a major strike by workers in the textile industry of which they were a part. The factory’s location in the suburb of Bang Khen, away from the centre of Bangkok, was not a reason for this lack of involvement. Textile workers in other areas of Bangkok and in neighbouring provinces to the west and south were actively engaged in the labour movement. In Omnoy, an industrial area in Nakhon Pathom Province west of Bangkok, five unionists had been arrested and imprisoned in March 1976, along with two students and two young graduates. They were charged with being Communists, undermining 2 Thongchai (2002: 244). 3 Morell and Chai-anan (1981: 275). 40 2 . Continuities and crisis national security, and the illegal possession of firearms. The evidence was so slight that the Public Prosecutor had to keep deferring their trial, and they were still in jail at the time of the coup on 6 October. There was none of this political drama at the Bang Khen factory. Many of the employees had chosen to leave provincial areas to take jobs in the factory. They made this choice because they preferred it to domestic or rural work. For them, becoming industrial workers under the particular conditions established at the factory was not an alienating experience, but one that offered them a better life than they thought was available at home. Nevertheless, this personal choice was made at a time in Thai history that brought starkly into question the relationship between a good life and a good society and challenged any assumption that one was possible without the other. Bang Khen workers and the brush with the new These chapters explore the essential connection but also the distinction between a good life and a good society. The employees’ experience with conditions in the Bang Khen factory provided them with many of the elements—social, cultural, religious, as well as material—that they saw as constituting a good life. Even work was not excluded from this view. For shopfloor operators in particular, the routine time spent in the repetitive interface with noisy machines was not of itself desirable. Nor was it repugnant. They saw it as a condition of their freedom because it was better than the alternatives, including equally monotonous and more arduous rural work or other work in the provinces. They valued the possibility—offered by modernity—of a freedom to choose something beyond the confines of family and family locality, even in contrast to the expressed wishes of their parents and the Buddhist norm of filial obedience. At the same time, the experience of the workers illustrates the difficulties of maintaining or developing a good life without its being grounded in a good society. In the Thailand of the period under review, the processes of modernisation were giving rise to changing and contested meanings about what constitutes a good society. It is easy, and tempting, to dichotomise these differing views as either based in the past or oriented to the future. The experience of the factory workers suggests that this is not a dichotomy in people’s mundane experience. The employees drew meaning and legitimacy from both sources; more even from the past in terms of how they explained their lives. Nor did they see the two as in contradiction, but as ordinary. Their work was for them not a rupture with the past but a present that provided wider possibilities than had been available for their parents. The contradictions inherent in their position 41 A Good Life: Human rights and encounters with modernity as urban industrial workers in a partially modern society were buffered by the conditions provided by the factory. Although these conditions arose from principles based in Japanese rather than in Thai industrial experience, they allowed for—indeed encouraged—a sense of personal continuities. Nevertheless, the factory and its workers were living through a pivotal moment in Thailand, in which the period from October 1973 to October 1976 constitutes Act One of an ongoing and not yet completed crisis in the process of Thai modernisation. The workers’ responses, muted though they were in comparison with others’, show that they, too, were brushed by the dilemmas of the new. Their responses need to be understood in the context of what was happening more broadly in Thailand at that critical time, but also in relation to the particular history of modernisation in the country. Monarchy and modernisation: The Chakri kings and the building of a nation Since the reign of the scholar-king Mongkut (Rama IV),4 from 1851 to 1868, a national discourse has developed around the Thai experience of modernisation that links a very particular set of concepts and gives these concepts meaning, and consequent value, in relation to each other.