The Origins of Thai-Chinese Identity

As Chinese New Year approaches, I thought I would take this opportunity to discuss the history of the largest overseas Chinese population in the world, in Thailand, and how its assimilation into domestic society stands out from the experiences of other overseas Chinese communities. Fourteen percent of the Thai population are of partial or full Chinese descent, according to the CIA World Factbook; but this statistic is likely a rough approximation, due to widespread intermarriage and seemingly fluid ethnic boundaries. Before we examine the Chinese assimilation into Thai society, however, it is informative to study the origins of Thai national identity.

The Emergence of a National Consciousness

The Thai word for ‘nation’ is chaat. Its original meaning derived from Pali-Sanskrit means “birth, race, lineage, and origin.” It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the meaning of chaat came to encompass the concept of nation, initially only in reference to Western countries. For instance, a court document from 1850 refers to chaat amerikan, which implied a nation of people rather than an American race. (See Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity). Towards the end of the century, with Britain and France expanding their empires into Burma and Indochina, Prince Prisdang, Siamese ambassador to France, proposed to King Chulalongkorn the drafting of a constitution, in the interest of the Thai chaat, and to counter the growing threat of colonization from European countries.

Further, under Chulalongkorn’s reign, a feudal system known as sakdina was abolished in order to consolidate power. The system, instituted in the fifteenth century, subjected every male to a social hierarchy. Sakdina was measured in terms of land, although it did not translate directly to property rights; the highest ranking prince’s sakdina was 10,000 rai (approximately 4,000 acres) while prai, or common peasant, was designated 25 rai. Slaves were designated five rai. Each prai was registered under a nobleman for whom he had to serve for half the year; slaves were considered personal property of their masters and thus served full-time. With the sakdina system abolished and provincial noblemen stripped of their prai and slave labor, power was concentrated in Bangkok. Siamese citizens were now considered subjects of the state and civilian loyalties shifted from the provincial to the national level.

King Vajiravudh and the Three Pillars of the Nation

King Vajiravudh (1910-1925), the sixth king of the Chakri dynasty, initiated a campaign of official nationalism, building his discourse upon three pillars: chaat, religion (Buddhism), and the monarchy. He asserted the Buddhist view that kingship is essential for orderly life and the prevention of society’s descent into anarchy. Further, according to Buddhist belief, birth into kingship reflected the accumulation of good karma in past lives; therefore, by virtue of birth, kings were judged as possessing the moral capacities and legitimacy to rule. With the establishment of the tri-pillar concept of nation, Vajiravudh stipulated that a threat to the king was a threat to the nation.

Meanwhile, the overseas Chinese community had begun to grow rapidly. The most recent wave of immigrants were predominantly southern Chinese farmers from Guangdong province fleeing drought, poverty, and the communist revolution. This alarmed the king, who saw it as a threat to Thai national identity; he dispensed heavy criticism against the Chinese, famously in two articles (under the pen name ‘Asavapahu’) titled Wake up Thailand and The Jews of the Orient. In the latter he writes, “the Chinese are like the Jews…the Chinese were taught to divide humanity into two groups, namely Chinese and savages. From the perspective of the Chinese, Europeans are savages just like other (non-Chinese) Asians and blacks. Therefore, it goes without saying that the Chinese have no intention of doing honest business with us.” (Note: the text is in Thai; the translation is my own)

The Chinese Assimilation

Despite the rhetoric, formal policies were never enacted against the Chinese as the king recognized the Thai economy had by then grown dependent on cheap Chinese wage labor. Yet what the immigrants didn’t experience in formal discrimination, they did in bigotry. A derogatory term commonly used by Thais to refer to Chinese immigrants was Jek, intended to deride a person whose origins and ancestry were unknown; a nomad who peddled unskilled labor (Thak Chaloemtiarana speculates in his book Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism that the term has two possible derivations, the first is the word for the number ‘one’ in the Teochew dialect spoken by the vast majority of immigrants, and the second is the word for ‘uncle’). In order to assimilate into Thai society, many Chinese families abandoned their Chinese surnames in favor of Thai ones, following the royal decree of 1909 mandating that all Thai citizens adopt surnames (up until then, Thais had only first names but no surnames to identify lineage). The result was an almost complete assimilation of the ethnic Chinese population into society, many among the present economic and political elite. Today, a significant portion of the population, particularly in the central and northern areas, are of partial or full Chinese descent, although it is difficult to gauge due to the high incidence of intermarriage. Thai-Chinese individuals will commonly refer to themselves as Thai first and foremost, some even neglecting to identify themselves as ethnically Chinese.

The assimilation of the Chinese population in Thai curiously contrasts with that of its neighbor, Malaysia. Malaysia has the world’s second largest overseas Chinese community (after Thailand) and while it also experienced a large wave of immigrants from Guangdong and Fujian concurrently to Thailand, Chinese Malaysians remain highly segregated from the Malays. This difference is not attributable to socioeconomic factors as Chinese Malaysians occupy a similar position amongst the elite as the Chinese in Thailand. Further, the adoption of new last names which contributed to the partial blurring of Chinese identity was a phenomenon unseen in Malaysia.

The Chinese in present-day Thai society

Today, discriminatory attitudes towards Thais of Chinese descent are almost non-existent, perhaps only manifesting in diluted form as comical caricatures on TV shows (ill-mannered, nouveau riche, and greedy, for instance). But in everyday society the economic and political prominence of the Thai-Chinese are undeniable, and in this sense they are anything but a marginalized population. Bangkok’s Chinatown is a thriving commercial district teeming with shoppers year-round but especially busy during Chinese New Year and the Vegetarian Festival – festivals adopted and celebrated by the general population. The state’s historically discriminatory rhetoric coupled with a lack of formal exclusionary policies may have inadvertently facilitated assimilation though without causing the erasure of Chinese identity, which in turn has pervaded greater domestic society.