Asia’s Youth in Revolt

In August 2006, I attended a rally headlined by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in northern Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. Senior members of his government, showing off their royalist yellow shirts, pumped up a big crowd of bolted-on Thai Rak Thai supporters. Back then, Thailand presented itself as one of Asia’s most promising democracies, walking tall after decades of military meddling in politics.

At the rally, under a colossal anti-drug sign, Thaksin railed against poverty and highlighted his success in securing northern Thailand’s interests. The big crowd cheered and hollered, eager for one of their own, a northern boy made good, to set the national agenda. I remember one gigantic homemade banner in the crowd read, “However many elections, we will vote for the Thai Rak Thai party.”

Just a month later, on September 19, 2006, Thaksin faced an unexpected exit, shunted aside in a coup by military and palace powerbrokers suspicious of his electoral juggernaut and its perceived monopoly on the affections of the rural masses and the urban poor. Thaksin, like so many before him, was vulnerable to charges that he abused his powers, pork-barrelled excessively, and risked forgetting his place.

For all of the ostentatious, royalist genuflection of Thai Rak Thai’s public performances, there were fears in palace and army circles that Thaksin was getting too big for his boots. Some imagined he was a threat to the exalted monarchy itself.

In the years after the 2006 coup, Thailand has faced wave after wave of political upheaval, including the coup against Thaksin’s sister, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, in 2014.

Since then, the military leadership, spearheaded by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, has manipulated the political machinery, imposing a constitution designed to limit the chance of another populist prime minister diluting the role of established interests in the palaces, the bureaucracy, and, mostly importantly, the armed forces.

When youthful Thai protesters now call for reform of those three lofty institutions, they are stepping on to a centuries-old battlefield, and one where generations before them have fought for participation, transparency, and justice. They are going toe-to-toe with history, in a cycle of political and cultural showdowns as old as the very notion of elite power.

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Today’s protests in Thailand join adjacent movements in Myanmar and Hong Kong where young people, often still in their teens and 20s, feel compelled to challenge entrenched systems of privilege, violence, and authority. This generation of activists were raised in technology-saturated homes, where connections regionally and globally have allowed culture and influence to spread at remarkable speeds. With the three-fingered “Hunger Games” salute as an obvious example, meme-worthy content has shifted the expectations of an entire generation.

Activists in all three countries, and more widely in East and Southeast Asia, see themselves connecting, in real-time, to share struggles against authoritarian regimes and the political manipulation that has constrained representative democracy in their countries. This pan-regional activist cooperation is known as the “Milk Tea Alliance,” a loose constellation across different societies all working against the further entrenchment of authoritarian powers. The generational divide is stark.

Now it is the digital natives – born into societies that had already accumulated the new technologies of rapid-fire communication and social interaction – that are furious with the abandonment of democracy by their elders.  

While some activists may still look to the United States or other distant democracies for inspiration, many find aspirational models in popular culture’s re-configurations of justice and freedom. For many, the “Hunger Games” trilogy set out human aspirations for self-determination in a fictionalized dystopian, authoritarian quagmire.

In that story, young, fit, brave fighters compete with each other, representing their downtrodden districts in battles designed to distract attention from injustice and exploitation. The protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, ends up taking on the powerbrokers who benefit from a rigged system, inspiring a rebellion.

After Thailand’s 2014 coup against the government led by Yingluck Shinawatra, the first defiant protesters on the streets of Bangkok co-opted the now famous three-fingered “Hunger Games” salute as a symbol of their solidarity. It is a generational marker, too, one that speaks to the shared Hollywood ideals that have shaped a whole generation’s political awareness across Asia.

They are aware that previous generations also struggled, often in bloody contests, to re-shape the region’s politics. And they know there are real consequences for those who take on the governments of Thailand, Myanmar, and China. People disappear. Others are condemned to long periods of detention on what would, in other political contexts, usually be considered spurious grounds. And then some are killed – often in cold blood by military and police forces empowered to take the fight to unarmed dissenters.

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The tactics used by protesters in Hong Kong since the determined effort by Beijing to stamp out its democratic defiance have also caught attention elsewhere. The wide-ranging, free-flowing, often leaderless, dimensions of these protests have tested the responses of security agencies, unaccustomed to a new style of large-scale mobilization.

Those who take up positions on the protest frontlines come provisioned to defend themselves against fire hoses, tear gas, rubber bullets, and, as seen in Myanmar in recent weeks, the ever-present threat of hard military power.

Unarmed protesters stand no chance against combat weapons, and the Myanmar military has alienated almost everyone in the country by seeking to re-impose its rule on what had been a compromised, but largely functional, semi-democratic system.

The large crowds of protesters who assembled across Myanmar’s cities and towns since the February 1 coup are this year’s most compelling example of the resentment so deeply felt when unelected interests – in this case a coup-ready military brass – are determined to reset the rules of the game.

In terms of historical context, it is worth noting that this generation of senior officers in Myanmar were just starting out in their careers when, in 1988, the army moved with such violence against student protests. It would be decades before the country saw a way past the stalemate that followed.

Yet the Myanmar people have now made it clear, at the ballot box in the 2015 and 2020 general elections, and, since the coup, on the streets, that they want to see the consolidation of a democratic system.

The problem for military strategists is that the system they broke with their ill-considered coup is one they had so carefully created and calibrated for well over a decade. The retreat to Naypyidaw in 2005, the promulgation of their own 2008 constitution, the first stage-managed elections in 2010, and their release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi that same year – these purposeful moves by military leaders set in motion the development of a more participatory political system.

After 2011, most people in Myanmar, while still frustrated by the military’s active role in legislative and executive politics, had grown to find the negotiated settlement was adequate to sustain economic growth and deliver on their demands for change. And while Aung San Suu Kyi and her key National League for Democracy lieutenants may have harbored doubts about the military’s trustworthiness, they needed to find a way to negotiate difference and build viable compromises.

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The military’s maneuvers were so successful they ultimately compelled Aung San Suu Kyi, in her role as state counsellor, to appear at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in December 2019 to defend the government’s campaigns against the Muslim Rohingyas.

That dark moment – when a Noble Peace Laureate stood to offer her voice in advocacy for indefensible and barbaric violence – was also about winning the votes of people back home whose fears were cynically manipulated against Myanmar’s most vulnerable minority.

Aung San Suu Kyi convinced herself that defending Myanmar’s Rohingya policy was not only an electorally important strategy but that it was in the broader national interest. She may have imagined that The Hague intervention could also help her management of what remained very fraught civil-military relations.

The top army leadership must also have considered, with some satisfaction, the political costs now shared by the elected leader. In a system designed by the military to defend its own interests, Aung San Suu Kyi was making life easier for the most cynical of the army’s strongmen.

Yet, with February’s coup, the military has inflicted deep wounds on its own reputation and much of that damage is now irreversible. Never again will representatives elected by Myanmar’s tens of millions of voters willingly accept the insistence that they sit side-by-side with military lawmakers. The 2008 constitution, always defective from the perspective of democratic idealists, has lost any residual ability to draw together pragmatic interests from across the political spectrum.

Previously, pragmatists, and some opportunists, shared a grudging willingness to accept compromises and wear the reputational risks of building common cause with the military. Such investment in that negotiated settlement was personally vexing for many involved.

Former rebel commanders, long-time political prisoners, key reformist thinkers, and zealous anti-military campaigners all came together to share Naypyidaw’s legislative compound with hundreds of military officers. The military personnel accepted orders to attend from their superiors bunkered down in a sprawling complex of grandiose facilities on the other side of the capital.

With the coup, the military has lost its convening power and its ability to influence, often through behind-closed-doors persuasion, the next steps in the political process.

Now, in the street-level clashes, pent-up disdain for the armed forces has flooded across the country. Whether it is ethnic armed groups, urban hipsters, industrial workers, middle-class professionals, farmers, or the Rohingyas, almost everyone is against the coup. There is now unity in Myanmar’s great diversity.

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The battle for Thailand’s future looks different, partly because the royal family has enjoyed remarkable recent decades of propaganda success. Until his death in 2016, King Bhumibol Adulyadej served as the exemplary center, held in a position of supreme reverence. The military also invested heavily in the success of royal initiatives, underwriting a vast nationwide effort that directed credit for economic and cultural achievements back to the king.

The same techniques have enjoyed less success with King Bhumibol’s son and successor, King Vajiralongkorn. Where his father cultivated a benevolent charisma, sustained over his final decades on the throne, the new king brings heavy baggage and a checkered reputation. While he might inspire loyalty and fear from senior officials and military commanders, many other Thais now publicly express harsh judgments about his fitness to rule.

Thailand’s impressive foreign ministry does an artful job of focusing attention on the country’s positive contributions, even though there are many officials, including those in security agencies, who also harbor doubts about the suitability of the new king.

But there is also a shared agenda for the royalist incumbents and the military leadership that has, for so long, offered protection to the palace. The fear is that breaking the linkages could imperil both institutions and their vast patronage networks. Prime Minister Prayut, with the mild endorsement he gained at the 2019 election, cannot afford to break the nexus of royalist-military power.

Over the past year it has become clear that a new and emboldened generation of political activists is prepared to confront these entrenched powers, defying decades of protocol that demands veneration of Thailand’s senior royals.

In response, the authorities have unleashed the lese-majeste law as weapon of choice to batter outspoken critics and target those who simply share impudent social media content. Long sentences for stepping out of line – one lese-majeste convict recently received 43-years for her online postings – has tended to temper enthusiasm for provocative social media displays.

At the same time, the palace has much work to do if it wants to win back the confidence of an increasingly exasperated and angry section of the public, now taking real risks in their protest activity. Even King Vajiralongkorn appears to have shifted priorities, reportedly spending much more time in the kingdom than he previously preferred. Negative political attention in Germany, which had been a favored retreat of his, must have also encouraged his advisers to counsel against the extravagance of pandemic-era international travel.

Through good adherence to social distancing and masking, Thailand has avoided much of the health damage unleashed by COVID-19, but its heavily trade and tourism exposed economy has not fared so well. The Prayut government has responded with big social welfare expenditures and has sought to focus attention on its commitment to helping those struggling to survive. Prayut, looking across the border at Myanmar, knows that with one big mistake, events can quickly spiral out of control.  

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To avoid that outcome, the People’s Republic of China is taking no chances in its strict management of Hong Kong politics. The prosperous city, so long a linchpin of global trade, has become an extreme case study of what happens when China’s dogmatic insistence on limiting civic freedoms rubs against the desire for democratic freedoms expressed on the streets.

The years-long clash between the Communist Party’s hardline policies and the million-strong protest movement sees prominent and popular pro-democracy leaders now behind bars. Others have fled abroad.

Going toe-to-toe with the world’s largest authoritarian machine requires enormous commitment, but the battle lines have now been drawn. Protesters elsewhere in Asia can see that the Hong Kong democracy movement is being systematically unravelled, but they also see an motivating example of youthful mobilization and spirited disobedience.

It helps that across Asia today the rising generation has technologies at their fingertips that were unimaginable to their parents. They have also, already, lived through tumultuous times.

Take Thailand as an example. The current crop of 20-somethings have already lived through the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2006 anti-Thaksin coup, an unending civil war in the southernmost provinces, and round after round of street clashes in Bangkok.

And that was all before the 2014 anti-Yingluck coup, the entrenchment of military rule, and the transition of royal authority to King Vajiralongkorn. And then the pandemic hit.

Is it any wonder that they embrace the possibilities of more upheaval, especially when there is the opportunity to create political space for themselves and for their beliefs in a fairer and more inclusive social order?

They have also realized that the rest of the world has few opportunities to influence the direction of change in their countries. For instance, it is quite clear that if Myanmar is to find a new democratic government, it will emerge from the battles of its activists and ordinary people, including its many ethnic minorities. Their dismay with the coup-making proclivities of the military brass will not readily fade away.

Nor will the torrent of critical attention now focused on Thailand’s royalist-military nexus ever be fully shackled again. Too many people have now learned too much, leaving permanent question marks over the royal family’s political and economic roles. Where King Vajiralongkorn struggles to communicate effectively with his people, young activists see weakness and confusingly anachronistic attention to hierarchy and prestige.

Finally, in the era of global movements forged by the politics of anti-racism and gender equality, the powerful bureaucracies and lofty elites of Southeast Asia struggle for relevant survival strategies.

Fifteen years ago, in 2006, when Thaksin was deposed, most of Thailand’s current generation of activists were only just coming into consciousness – many in primary school, others still learning to walk and talk. Their awareness of the military’s power would have been limited at that time.

Now, as the rising generation, they see deep problems in the economy and the entrenchment of elite privilege. Some are not prepared to wait for others to make incremental changes; they are demanding a wide-ranging series of reforms to transform the national direction. Like their peers in Myanmar and Hong Kong, they have already taken serious risks and encountered firm resistance.

The question becomes: What happens to the arc of history if one of these youthful uprisings prevail? What happens to Asia if Myanmar’s coup can be unwound? Or if Thailand’s king is forced to embrace real reform? Or if, one day, Hong Kongers have a democracy to call their own?