By THOMAS FULLER
BANGKOK — Thailand is a country of 145,000 Mercedes Benz sedans and about 75,000 villages, many of them hamlets afflicted by poverty.
During nearly three weeks of mass anti-government demonstrations here, luxury cars have had to share the streets of Bangkok with the blaring megaphones of rural discontent.
Standing in the back of a pickup truck and shaded by a wide-brimmed hat was Thanida Paveen, a 43-year-old mother of two who explained the epiphany that brought her to the demonstration.
“I used to think we were born poor and that was that,” said Ms. Thanida, who grew up in the provinces but now lives in Bangkok and rents out rooms to factory workers in the city’s industrial outskirts. “I have opened my mind to a new way of thinking: We need to change from the rule of the aristocracy to a real democracy.”
The Thailand of today is not quite the France of 1789 — there is no history of major tensions between rich and poor here, and most of the country is peaceful despite the noisy protests. But more than ever Thailand’s underprivileged are less inclined to quietly accept their station in life as past generations did and are voicing anger about wide disparities in wealth, about shakedowns by the police and what they see as the longstanding condescension in Bangkok toward people who speak provincial dialects, especially from the northeast.
The deference, gentility and graciousness that have helped anchor the social hierarchy in Thailand for centuries are fraying, analysts say, as poorer Thais become more assertive, discarding long-held taboos that discouraged confrontation.
Four years of political turmoil have brought clearer divisions between wealthy families and their domestic staff, between the patrons of expensive restaurants and the waiters who serve them, between golfing businessmen and the legions of caddies who carry their bags.
“This is a newfound consciousness of a previously neglected part of Thai society,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, one of the country’s leading political scientists and a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s FSI-Humanities Center. “In the past they were upset, but they weren’t cohesive as a force and coherent in their agenda. New technologies have enabled them to unify their disparate voices of dissatisfaction.”
The role of technology in bringing together the protesters has been crucial. The leaders of the protest movement have used community radio stations, mobile-phone messaging and the Internet to forge an identity for lower-income Thais and connect a vast constellation of people in villages and towns.
At times the protests in Bangkok could be described as flash mobs of the disaffected. Protesters, who wear trademark red shirts, have converged on government buildings, banks and military bases across the city guided by text messages.
“This would not have been possible 10 years ago,” said Ms. Thanida, who was returning from military barracks in Bangkok where protesters had demanded that soldiers leave the area. The military acquiesced. Like many protesters, she subscribes to D Station, a “red shirt” news service that gives updates and instructions to protesters.
The leaders of the red-shirted protesters have advertised the current round of protests as class warfare and describe themselves as defenders of the “prai,” a feudal word meaning commoner or lower-class citizen. “The blood of the prai is worth nothing” is a phrase now affixed on bumper stickers and T-shirts.
That may be overblown rhetoric. There are many stories of upward mobility in Thailand and, despite the presence of tens of thousands of protesters, the anger has not translated into personal attacks on the wealthy.
The main target of the protesters’ ire seems to be the system: the perception that bureaucrats and the military serve the elite at the expense of the poor. The protesters bewail the 2006 military coup that removed Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon turned prime minister who focused his policies on rural areas. And they question the fairness of a judicial system that removed two subsequent prime ministers who were allied with Mr. Thaksin.
To many outsiders, Mr. Thaksin’s role is puzzling: The notion that a billionaire is leading Thailand’s disaffected to rebellion verges on the absurd. It also infuriates the Bangkok elite, who see Mr. Thaksin’s role as largely self-serving. Mr. Thaksin, most analysts agree, was hardly a paragon of democratic values during his five years in power. He intimidated the media, stripped institutions like the anti-corruption commission of their independence and mixed his business interests with those of the government.
Many protesters, as well as associates of Mr. Thaksin, say the protest movement has taken on much larger dimensions than just a battle between Mr. Thaksin and his political rivals.
“This goes well beyond Thaksin,” said Pansak Vinyaratn, one of the main architects of policies during the Thaksin administration. “The question is, will the Thai state be able to harness this negative energy to something positive.”
It is significant that Mr. Thaksin made his fortunes in the telecommunications business. Even his critics concede that he was able to communicate with the rural poor and deliver results in ways that none of his predecessors had achieved. As prime minister, he gave lower-income Thais a taste of a better life, including cheap loans that allowed people to buy pickups and mobile phones, which inadvertently or not laid the groundwork for the current political movement.
In 2005, after four years of Mr. Thaksin as prime minister, the number of people using mobile phones in the vast, rice-growing northeast had more than doubled to 5.3 million.
Incomes in the northeast rose nearly 50 percent during the Thaksin government and even more in the provinces east and south of Bangkok.
The protesters today are not the country’s desperately poor, says Ammar Siamwalla, a prominent economist in Thailand who specializes in development issues. They are more likely to be people whose expectations were raised and then dashed: they started small businesses like hair salons in the Thaksin years when more money started circulating in rural areas, Mr. Ammar said. “It jump-started a lot of things.”
After the coup in 2006, these small-time entrepreneurs were stuck. “They were suddenly caught short by the lack of access to credit,” said Mr. Ammar, who is otherwise critical of Mr. Thaksin’s rule.
Debt levels in the northeast doubled to an average of about 100,000 baht, or just over $3,000, per family. Today rural families still carry this debt, but their incomes are relatively stagnant, in part because crop prices were deflated by last year’s economic crisis.
Beyond the economics, there is an intangible side to Thailand’s political crisis that may be even more significant for the country in the long run.
The once deeply ingrained cultural mores that discouraged displays of anger, that prized politeness and justified the entitlements of the royalty and the elite have been eroded by technology and mobility. The prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, rarely visits the northeastern part of the country because his aides fear a hostile reception. (Mr. Abhisit has been ensconced in a military barracks in Bangkok for much of the past two weeks.) Another group of protesters, the “yellow shirts,” who helped precipitate Mr. Thaksin’s ouster with their own demonstrations, held the country hostage by shutting down the airport for a week in late 2008, a protest that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers.
The traditional restraints on aggressive and argumentative behavior — the Buddhist clergy and a once deeply held fear of bad karma, among other factors — have been weakened, says William J. Klausner, an expert on Thai culture and Buddhism who has studied village life since he moved to Thailand in the 1950s.
“Villagers today feel far less inclined to accord deference and respect to those in authority simply because of their privileged position and perceived sense of entitlement,” Mr. Klausner wrote in an essay.
Many Thais say they are shocked by the coarse language used by political activists of all stripes today. Insults that were once rarely heard in public have become common.
Thailand appears to be losing a small part of what has long attracted millions of tourists to its shores: a culture of unflappable, bend-over-backwards politeness.
Pakawan Malayavech, a 55-year-old native of a northeastern province, reflected on these changes as she walked through a crowd of tens of thousands of red-shirted protesters recently. She left Thailand as a young woman for the United States, where she drove a Good Humor ice cream truck in Fairfax, Virginia, and did other odd jobs. Then, in 1999, she returned to retire, and now she sees the country like frames in time-lapse photography.
“People used to forgive and forget easily,” she said. “Now the new generation are more like Americans — they talk back.”
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