Thailand Capital

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Admin
Thailand Capital

Thailand Capital

The Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) derived from the same sources that also inspired the Indochinese and Malayan Communist Parties. Young people educated in Europe by colonial powers often found themselves radicalized by the ideas they found there and subsequently brought them home to share with their comrades. Thailand of course was not formally colonized but received additional fraternal support from the Chinese Communist Party. A number of leading Thai Communists studied at university in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province and the closest part of China to Thailand.

The CPT focused its efforts on those parts of the country where inequality and poverty were the worst. In the north and the north-east, therefore, most of the support for the CPT was garnered. Many peasants in those regions found themselves disenfranchised by successive military governments and were receptive to ideas of equality and revolution. Vietnamese comrades were also active in these areas prior to the intensification of fighting in their own country. Thailand was a predominantly agricultural society and so the great majority of people were rural peasants, involved in subsistence rice-farming. There was no substantial urban working-class and, consequently, the CPT had to follow a Maoist rather than a strictly Marxist-Leninist approach. The Russian Revolution had been based on the uprising of the industrial working class; the Chinese Revolution was based on seeding the agricultural peasants with advance cadres aimed at educating and mobilizing them to provide support. A similar pattern had to be followed in Thailand if a further revolution were to be successful.

For some years, while the fighting in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was at its fiercest, the CPT was able to mobilize some thousands of supporters and threaten a wider uprising, even if it was never likely that this would be successful. What proved to be the principal reason for the defeat of the CPT was not so much the persistent attempts of the military forces to suppress it but the organization of paramilitary forces known as the Scouts. These people greatly outnumbered the membership of the CPT and were motivated by a potent combination of nationalism, Buddhism and support for the monarchy. Armed by the military, the Scouts cheerfully organized their patrols and missions and conducted operations away from the sight of the authorities.