In the 1990s, China reportedly established a signals intelligence base on Great Coco Island, though it was never confirmed. And now, Burma’s tourism authorities intend to open the islands up to foreign and domestic tour groups with the first ferry of tourists due to sail on Friday…A return ticket price for the first tour has been quoted at 25,000 kyat (US $25) although the price is expected to be much higher for foreign tourists. Travel agencies in Rangoon expect the tours to be popular though little is known about any facilities on the islands.

- Extracted from Wai Moe, “Coco Islands to Open for Tourism”, The Irrawaddy, 19 November 2009. Thanks to a long-time New Mandala reader for pointing out this tourism opportunity.

In other words, they spent this important festival doing exactly the same activity that consumes everyone everyday in Kam villages during this period: harvesting rice. Many people who worked on the hillsides in the daytime later watched the lengthy parades and glitzy celebrations on TV that evening, but most described the event using the Kam expression kay da sep or “they hold a festival”. The idea of it being a festival that Kam villagers themselves might share in was never expressed, even amongst younger generations of Kam people who speak Chinese and could understand the TV broadcasts.

Nevertheless, only a week or so beforehand more than twenty Kam women from this village had been invited to sing at a widely publicised festival in a large city in the same province (Guizhou), winning a prize of over 10,000 RMB (more than AUD$2000). Although this and all other groups participating in the festival had been specifically chosen to represent areas where important meetings for the establishment of the PRC had been held, and although the singing festival once again focussed upon the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic, only a few of my Kam friends who sang in the performance were aware of or interested in why the festival was held. Here’s an image from their performance.

But the situation was quite different for a big music festival held a few days after National Day in the Kam village of Sao (in Chinese, Zhaoxing 肇兴). This Kam festival is celebrated each year on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, the same day that many Chinese people celebrate Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival (in Chinese, Zhongqiu jie 中秋节). As these images illustrate, the well-attended festival involved over a hundred gao gn – ensembles of bamboo free-reed mouth organs that are referred to in Chinese as lusheng 芦笙.

These all-male groups competed in pairs over one long, hot afternoon, moving through qualifying and semi-final rounds to the finals. The judges for the competition sat on a distant hillside overlooking the village, waving a green flag after a below-standard pair of gao gn played, and a red flag (accompanied with great cheers from the crowd below) when the teams were allowed to advance to the next level of the competition. When each pair of ensembles competed the two groups played sets of instruments with different tuning, and they did not make any attempt to co-ordinate their playing except with members of their own group. Despite many Kam friends complaining about the terrible sound of the performance, many Kam people travelled for hours in order to attend.

Although the Kam people I’ve described here had a greater sense of personal investment in this local festival than those sponsored by the Chinese state, it doesn’t mean that Kam people don’t ultimately see themselves as Chinese citizens. But it does suggest that the culturally-determined basis for identity in Kam and other many southwestern Chinese minority groups (which includes a number of Tai-Kadai speaking groups) that has operated for millennia still remains strong. For Kam people, their membership in these groups has been determined by a shared language and culture, not by shared lineage or official registration. Hence even today, festivals like National Day that do not originate culturally from Kam areas are seen as “theirs” not “ours”, and even local Kam festivals whose aesthetics are not considered appealing retain their cultural and social meaning.

Today is the first anniversary of one of the more important days in recent Thai political history: 7 October 2008.

Soon after the bloody clashes of that day, a photographic chronicle of events was produced by regular New Mandala contributor Nick Nostitz.  It provides a graphic overview of the injuries that resulted when the People’s Alliance for Democracy protesters confronted a Border Patrol Police (BPP) and Metropolitan Police effort to disperse them.  One of the key issues emerging from those protests centers on the use, or misuse, of CS tear-gas grenades.

Here we hope to summarise the role of tear gas in the events of 7 October 2008.

Trawling the source material it appears that six types of CS tear-gas grenades were used by BPP and Metropolitan Police officers in Bangkok on 7 October 2008. Most (about 70 per cent) were fired by Chinese Norinco [North Industries Corporation] 38-mm tear-gas guns, which are 818 mm long, have an effective range of 130-140 metres, and discharge tear-gas canisters at a velocity of about 60 metres a second. According to eye-witnesses, and this video footage, some grenades were fired by M-79s and others were hand-thrown. Four types were manufactured in China, including both gun-fired tear-gas canisters and hand-thrown grenades; the other types were made in the United States and Spain. The BPP were issued only with the Chinese types, while the Metropolitan Police used the US grenades.

The Chinese types use a small amount of RDX explosive to burst the gas container open and hence disperse the gas faster, more uniformly and across a larger area than most other grenades. They are also cheaper. However, the RDX can also make them lethal, especially when they are fired into crowds at short distances. Most of the casualties on 7 October were caused by the 38-mm aluminium canister-type, which had been ordered from China in 1993 and delivered in 1995. They are a variant of Norinco’s NF-02 ‘explosive projectile’, which has a length of 125 mm, carries 40 grams of CS agent, and has five grams of RDX explosive.

Pornthip Rojanasunand, director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science, said on 13 October, after viewing tests of each of the grenade types, that the canisters should be ‘considered weapons, not crowd control devices’. Pornthip also said that ‘the police and military generally use American [rather than Chinese tear-gas], but it’s expensive – much more expensive. But comparatively, the American [tear-gas] is safer’.

The BPP had no training whatsoever with the Chinese grenades. Most had probably never fired or even handled the Norinco 38-mm guns and NF-02 rounds before 7 October. Yet the NF-02 canister is clearly marked with a warning, in English, that it is to be used only by ‘qualified personnel trained in riot control tactics’. It also says: ‘Do not fire directly at persons as serious injury or death could occur’. The Norinco specifications for the NF-02 state that it has a shelf-life of five years from the date of manufacture, and that it should not to be used if it has been ’stored longer than eight years from the date of manufacture’ – i.e., after 2001. The NF-02s used in Bangkok were 15 years old.

On 14 October, the commander of the Royal Thai Police Ordnance Division, Police Major General Phuwadol Wuttaganok, said that approximately 2,000 Chinese-made tear-gas grenades had been recalled from the BPP and the Bangkok Metropolitan Police the day after the fatal crackdown on the protesters; they were being stored at the Ordnance Division, and he expected that the ‘entire supply’ would probably be destroyed. Moreover, he said that police units had been ordered not to use US tear-gas grenades because they had also been found ‘to be deadly’. He also said that the police in charge of dispersing the protesters were unaware of the explosive impact of the Chinese canisters, and that: ‘I guess they just thought all tear-gas canisters were the same. They were told to fire — and they simply fired’.

Since the events of October 2008 the government of Somchai Wongsawat has fallen and the Democrat-led government of Prime Minist Abhisit Vejjajiva has come to power. What, then, is the legacy of 7 October?  Since that fateful day Thailand has seen other efforts to disperse protesters.   Most have involved violence but tear gas has not been a key part of the weaponry used.  The East Asia Summit in April 2009 was abandoned, ultimately, because the Red Shirt protesters could not be controlled.  Days later, the Thai Army displayed its preferred method for clearing protests in Bangkok, as it moved across the city.  The BPP and Metropolitan Police have continued to be involved in policing subsequent protests, although they have not been called upon to fire tear gas in the same way again.

In September 2009 there were reports that Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission will file charges against former Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, former Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh and former National Police Chief General Patcharawat Wongsuwan.  With legal proceedings on the horizon this episode of Thai political drama is not over yet.

In fact, while there is still partisan mileage to be made from revisiting 7 October 2008 we will probably be hearing much more about the events of that day.  We hope that our modest effort to consolidate the public information on the use of tear gas will assist New Mandala readers as they revisit this topic.

The details are:

Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation – CALL FOR PANELS / PAPERS

2nd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network

Chiang Mai University (RCSD), Thailand

5 – 7 November  2010

State-centered views of the world continue to predominate, but it is increasingly apparent that these restrict perspectives on dynamics within broader regional fields. In an attempt to leapfrog a definition of the world in terms of national economies, societies, cultures and histories, ‘borderland’ centered perspectives have emerged. But whereas borderland studies have quickly developed in Africa, Europe and North America, the field is still in its infancy in Asia. ‘Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation’ intends to encourage scholarship that looks across Asian borders.

The conference takes its cue from an important new book by James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale UP, 2009). In this book, Scott focuses on the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and its lower ranges that run from the Central Highlands in Vietnam, most of Laos, Northern Thailand, Southwest China, Northern Burma, Northeast India, Eastern Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet. The 200 million people living in this huge region (over 15 million km²) are geographically dispersed and culturally diverse, yet they share crucial cultural, economic and social characteristics: hill agriculture, physical mobility, relatively egalitarian social structures, as well as commonalities in material culture and outlook. National borders often appear utterly arbitrary to them as many groups spill across two or more national borders. In this way they distinguish themselves from the lowland populations who dominate the states in which they live. Scott refers to this region as ‘Zomia’, a term coined by Willem van Schendel (2002/2005).

What is the viability and relevance of a concept such as Zomia for the study of Asian borderlands? To what extend are people in such border zones sharing ideas, practices and attitudes? Why and how do they remain different? How are relationships, alliances and conflicts between hills and plains people defined? In what ways are cultural and social dynamics in and beyond such a region influenced by political boundaries? How do people engage in, and are engaged by, processes of modernization and globalization?

We invite conceptually innovative papers, based on new research, which address questions such as these, in order to develop new perspectives on the study of Asian borderlands. Panels will be considered that have a thematic focus, are of a comparative character, and involve scholars affiliated to distinct research institutions. Click here to submit proposals. Participants will be notified by February 1st, 2010.

Deadline to send in abstracts / panel proposals: 1 December 2009

Participants are expected to fund their own travel and stay. Very limited financial support may be made available to specific scholars residing in Asia. If you would like to be considered for a grant: please submit with your abstract for a panel and/or paper a short letter motivating your request. Please specify the kind of funding that you have applied for or will receive from other sources. The conference operates on a very limited budget, and will not normally be able to provide more than a partial coverage of costs of travel and stay.

Convenors:
Dr. Chayan Vaddhanaphuti
Prof. Willem van Schendel
Dr. Erik de Maaker

The advertisement sets out all of the details:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison seeks candidates for an assistant professor (tenure-track) position with a specialization in Hmong studies or related highland societies in Southeast Asia and/or adjacent regions. Appointment to begin August 2010. Ph.D. required. Previous teaching experience at the college/university level desirable but not required. Duties include teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level, conduct scholarly research in area of expertise, and perform university and professional service as appropriate. The successful candidate will be expected to do collaborative work in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and participate in program activities. The tenure home for the appointment will reside in a department appropriate to the candidate’s discipline, i.e., social sciences or arts and humanities. To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by December 1, 2009. Applications and three letters of reference, in PDF format, should be sent via email to Dr. Michael Cullinane at mmcullin@wisc.edu and Professor Kris Olds at kolds@wisc.edu. For additional information, see http://www.ohr.wisc.edu/pvl/pv_062881.html and http://hmongstudiesmadison.wordpress.com/. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is an equal opportunity employer and encourages women and minorities to apply. A criminal background check may be required prior to employment.

With this in mind, I was pleased to see that there has been a recent spurt of eye-opening coverage that puts the web censorship that occurs in countries like Thailand and Burma in a wider context.

The Wall Street Journal has produced an interactive map of the Asian region (all the way across to the Middle East) that  gives a clear indication of the countries that have made the most substantial efforts to censor online content.  The map is best examined in conjunction with an article by James Hookway that describes attempts to circumscribe access to certain kinds of Internet material in China, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.  A recent article by Geoffrey Cain picks up similar themes and discusses the future of “Asia’s fragile cyber-democracies”.  That piece has already been translated into Thai.

From where I sit, real-world politics are increasingly taking root in the fertile (but muddy) soil of the online world.  This is happening almost everywhere.  Repressive governments, of whatever stripe, will continue to fear the subversive potential of online content. In response, their filtering, censorship and intimidation will probably only become more sophisticated as they meet new and unforeseen online challenges.

For those of us who embrace the potential (and the pitfalls) of web-based analysis, debate and discussion these are issues that will need to be constantly reassessed.  The future battlegrounds for politics, but also for academia and journalism, are fast taking shape online.  These recent articles provide some helpful pointers about issues to keep in mind.

It’s not a pretty picture for Thailand. There have been modest increases in rice yields but, according to IRRI, Thailand’s yields are among the lowest in the world. This may come as something of a surprise given that Thailand is the largest exporter of milled rice in the world.

Thai garlic yields have increased a lot more (roughly trebling) but there have been similar increases in both Korea and China, both of which started from a much higher base. The gap between Thailand and the others is widening and Thailand is falling well behind the Asian average. Chinese garlic yields are almost three times higher than Thai garlic yields. Korean garlic yields in the 1970s were higher than Thai yields in 2007.

If we want to understand some of the political tensions that have become increasingly evident within Thailand over the past few years, the failure of successive Thai governments to deliver higher agricultural productivity may be one useful place to start.

As China continues to have problems with its own internal ethnic tensions, some of those it faces in Burma are richly ironic, but the entire situation is becoming more complex and fraught by the day.

- Michael Sainsbury, “For China, Burma is thorny territory”, The Australian, 8 September 2009.  This old New Mandala picture provides some context for the headline.

[This post is an introductory comment to Doug Miles' detailed review of Hjorleifur Jonsson's Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand. The full review is available here.]

“Now where did I leave my jolly pith helmet?”

I commend this book for initiating a shift of paradigm in research concerning the Yao of southern China and the Southeast Asian highlands .The author speculates on the “racialisation of Thailand’s ethnic landscape” since the beginning of the 20th Century. He introduces that insight by reference to the “proto-ethnographers” of the The Siam Society’ (1920-64) whose headquarters in Bangkok once provided access to the “ most English of gentleman’s facilities” in the royal capital and to a cloak room large enough “to shelve every pith helmet worn to an entire AGM quorum” (pers. com 12/4/68 from Mr Donald Gibson, British Consul, Chiangmai). Jonsson further develops his case as a critique of the later field research conducted among the Kingdom’s mountain minorities by Western anthropologists affiliated with the government’s Tribal Research Centre (Institute) TRC(I) ( 1965-1989) . Investigation into the operations of the TRC’s still extant successor, The Tribal Museum (1997- ) extends that theme.

The book argues persuasively that the Thai Kingdom has harnessed expatriate expertise to promote public conceptualisation of uplanders as the “un-Thai” and to legitimate processes whereby such highland populations have become subject to draconian state controls including military eviction from the jungle terrain of Phrachangnoi where Yao used to hunt, harvest opium poppy and cultivate grain swiddens by techniques of shifting cultivation.

For example, the Royal Thai Airforce forced Yao out of the mountainous Phrachangnoi Subdistrict and into the lowlands by bombing their forests, farms and villages . These attacks began in 1968 and were followed immediately by deployments of the Royal Thai Army ( 3rd Region) which seeded the habitat of the evacuees with landmines that prevented the return of all but the most foolhardy throughout the subsequent forty years.

Several of Jonsson’s older informants were fugitives from the horrors of this violence . About 250 of them made it from the village of Pulangka to the fringes of Chiengkam, the closest Thai town. The camp of miserable bush shelters they originally established there has now developed into an outersuburb of 24 imposing longhouses each owned by a Yao kin unit (peo) whose memebers to-day total about 800. Such observations are basic to the book’s enquiry into the opposition by urban Yao to recent state legislation (1996) which purportedly enforces conservation of high altitude forests and protection of endangered fauna. The book illuminates the desperation with which a marginalised minority has resorted to arson to destroy the headquarters of a newly created wild life sanctuary which a government decree has recently established within that territory. But there are flaws in the scholarship of both the reading and the fieldwork from which the author has generated these provocative perspectives .

In this paper I do more anthropologically than simply review Jonsson’s book and that is because New Mandala has provided me with the rare opportunity to detail two of the major discourses in the experience on which I draw in responding to the volume. First, what I write is as much about the nitty-gritty of the anthropological fieldwork which I myself have conducted among Yao in Thailand during the last 40 years as it is an assessment of a monograph by an anthropologist reporting on his research while living more recently with these these people. I will appreciate any response from professional colleagues and other readers especially to two of the propositions through which I take issue with Jonsson:

• That the Yao are most approporiately conceptualisaed as subjects of their own theocratic state which transcends national boundaries rather than as one of the stateless tribal minorities with which national and academic authorities have typically classified these people; and
• That far from disintegrating through suburbanisation and removal from the rural context in which they had developed, their bilaterally extended families (peo) have thrived and become infrastructurally crucial both to the prosperity they have regained and to the retention of their ethnic group’s overall cohesion.

I also present myself to the reader as someone whose experience happens to enable him to assess the significance of Jonsson’s work in relation to the various and changing intellectual prioirities whose hegemony over more than 25 years has collectively determined what Yao Studies have tended to be. It is in regard to this multidisciplinary enterprise that I propose the concept of “bibliophilia” to explain how a dominant discourse of religious philology has marginalised anthropology in scholarship about the Yao for nearly three decades. Hence, I applaud the volume for clearing a pioneering path into a new paradigm of research about this minority in Thailand.