A tale of two protests in Bangkok and
Beijing
By PHILIP CUNNINGHAM
,
27 July 2000
In both cases police roughed up protesters, hundreds of whom were arrested
and trucked away to detention centers. In both cases, there were echoes of
past student demonstrations, where a desperate "nothing left to
lose" mentality reigned, leading to the defiant occupation of a
symbolic location near the seat of government.
In the ranks of the hardcore Bangkok protesters camped out on the street,
rain or shine, it is hard to find anyone of working age, let alone any
youth. It's fair to say a good percentage of the protesters are
grandparents. I suspect it's not so much that the protesters' children and
children's children don't care about the dwindling number of fish in the
Moon River, but they're preoccupied with work and school.
The uncanny similarities between the two cases of provincial folk taking
their protests to the city do not diminish several important differences.
The causes being protested are as different as night and day and the
nature of the state in which the protests are taking place must be given
due consideration.
The Thai protesters were not arrested for protesting, but for scaling a
fence and occupying the lawn of Government House; like their counterparts
in Seattle or Washington, they were arrested for deliberate civil
disobedience.
In democratic Thailand, the Pak Moon demonstrations have been going at it
for eight years, mostly in the deep countryside along the banks of the
Moon River where two unpopular dams were commissioned without heeding the
input of the people most affected. Prolonged occupations of the dams and
state facilities adjacent to the dams have been tolerated, and although
protest leaders have been served arrest warrants, little action has been
taken. The protests have been tolerated but they have not been given much
attention by Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai's embattled government.
Bangkok Gov. Bhichit Ratakul, working to defuse a potentially volatile
situation in his last few weeks on the job, had graciously provided
portable toilets and tanks of clean water for the rural visitors.
China's press, in contrast, is not free to report on the Falun Gong
protests at all. China's newspapers and TV stations not only cannot voice
their own observations or opinions on the matter, but are not free to
remain silent either. Press outlets are required to air the government's
official line, which calls for denouncing Falun Gong in the most vitriolic
language imaginable, as articulated by Xinhua News Agency.
Falun Gong held an underground press conference for Beijing's foreign
correspondents late last year. It was a bold move for a banned
organization in a country where journalists are routinely tailed. Not
surprisingly, many of the Chinese who participated were later arrested and
four foreign reporters were reprimanded.
Probably the most striking difference between the peasant protests in
Bangkok and Beijing are that the aims and goals of the Thai peasant
movement are rational and pragmatic, whereas the aims and goals of the
Chinese peasant movement are based on superstition and the personality
cult of a mystic leader.
In both China and Thailand, thousands of rural activists have recently
taken trains to the capital city to vent their grievances in the most
public way possible. They join the ranks of rural migrants, numbering in
the millions already, and can blend in and find support in this sea of
displaced rural folk.
Philip
Cunningham is an independent journalist based in Bangkok.
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