Surface Repression, Substantive Compromise

State Capacity, Anti-Chinese Policies, and Thailand’s Low-Cost Path to Modernization under Phibun

Abstract

This paper examines Thailand's anti-Chinese policies during the period of Phibun Songkhram (1938–1944; 1948–1957), exploring why they exhibited a highly contradictory pattern of “initially hardline but ultimately compromising.” It further analyzes how this policy model objectively propelled Thailand's modernization process. The article argues that while the Phibun government implemented radical anti-Chinese measures at the levels of nationalist mobilization and symbolic politics—such as closing Chinese schools, restricting Chinese-language media, imposing occupational exclusion, and promoting nationalist propaganda—it remained economically and organizationally dependent on Chinese capital, commercial networks, and professional expertise. This created a dual-track policy structure of “surface suppression and core concession.”

Theoretically, this paper integrates Skocpol and Finegol's state capacity theory (1982) with Anderson's conception of “nation” (1991), arguing that anti-Chinese policies stem not solely from nationalist ideology but are profoundly shaped by structural constraints on state capacity. Through systematic analysis of administrative fragmentation, deficiencies in professional bureaucracy and policy instruments, and Thailand's long-established tradition of political learning, this paper reveals the fundamental reasons why the Phibun government could not implement deep interventions in the core of the Chinese economy.

From a comparative perspective, this study argues that unlike Indonesia and the Philippines, which adopted high-cost exclusionary approaches to address Chinese issues, Thailand, constrained by limited state capacity, chose a low-cost modernization path by integrating the Chinese into the “Thai imagined community.” This choice not only avoided capital flight and severe social conflict but also facilitated the structural transformation of the Chinese into “Sino-Thais,” making them crucial collaborators in state-building and economic development. This paper thus argues that the historical significance of the anti-Chinese movement during the Phibun era lies not in its exclusionary nature per se, but in the complex interplay it reveals between state capacity, nationalism, and modernization.