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By Root 1825 0

and conglomerates. All of Thailand’s billionaires are ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, as Kanchana’s comments suggest, unlike elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Chinese have assimilated quite successfully into Thailand, and there is relatively little anti-Chinese animus. In Thailand today, many Thai Chinese speak only Thai and consider themselves as Thai as their indigenous counterparts. Intermarriage rates between the Chinese and the indigenous majority (many of whom, at least in Bangkok, have some Chinese ancestry already) are much higher than elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Perhaps most strikingly, the country’s top political leaders, including a recent prime minister, are often of Chinese descent, although they usually have Thai-sounding surnames and speak little or no Chinese.

Although interethnic socializing and intermarriage may seem perfectly normal to Westerners, it bears emphasizing how markedly Thailand differs in this regard from her Southeast Asian neighbors. In Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, rates of intermarriage between the Chinese and the indigenous majority are close to zero. The Chinese in these countries remain a conspicuously insular minority, living, working, and socializing entirely separately from the indigenous majorities.

Many have speculated about the reasons for the starkly different rates of intermarriage and assimilation. According to one professor of law from Singapore, the main reason is the “pork factor.” “Indonesians and Malaysians are mostly Muslims,” he explains, “and they don’t eat pork. The Chinese love pork; they eat it all the time. And for Chinese, eating is a huge part of their lives. Thus, social interactions are impossible.” This professor was being facetious, but he is clearly right that religion has played an important role: Thailand is not Muslim but largely Buddhist, a cultural affinity that has made assimilation much easier for the Thai Chinese, many of whom adhere to a syncretic combination of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.

In any event, despite the persisting, glaring market dominance of the Thai Chinese, there appears to be little anti-Chinese sentiment in Thailand today. To be sure, some ambivalence toward the Thai Chinese remains. Kanchana, for example, made some slightly contradictory remarks in our conversation. “All the gold shops are owned by rich Chinese—I mean, pure Chinese,” she said at one point. And: “When the economy gets bad, then Thais resent the Chinese more.” Still, the fact remains that ethnic relations today between the Chinese and indigenous Thais in Thailand are remarkably civilized.

Thus Thailand, which began democratizing in 1992, is arguably a counterexample to the sobering predictions of the previous chapters. In Thailand today, ethnic hatred and demagoguery do not seem to be problems despite recent market and democratic reforms in the presence of a market-dominant ethnic minority.

Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. The telltale question with respect to Thailand is: How did the country come to be the way it is? In significant part, the answer is decades of coerced assimilation and cultural eradication by the Thai government, aimed at eliminating the Chinese as a distinct ethnic group. In other words, the Thai government in earlier decades pursued its own version of a backlash against a market-dominant minority. If ethnic relations in Thailand do seem hopeful, the Thai path to assimilating its Chinese minority is unlikely to provide a useful policy model today.

“The Jews of the East”

The Chinese were not always so welcome in Thailand. After 1842 in Thailand (then known as Siam), large numbers of immigrants arrived from China. These principally male immigrants typically married Thai women and prospered. Indeed, the Chinese in this early wave of immigration were more or less completely absorbed into the Thai population.

Discord between the two peoples began after 1910, with the rise of nationalism in both China and Thailand. In 1909 the Chinese government passed a nationality law proclaiming that all persons with Chinese