HONG KONG – Political mayhem has broken out in Hong Kong, and has caught China’s government, already in the midst of a delicate political transition of its own, completely unprepared.
The 1,200 privileged delegates carefully screened by China to “elect” Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive (CE) on March 25 would normally take their cues from China’s rulers. Indeed, the original electoral script was a one-act, one-star play.
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Henry Tang, unkindly nicknamed “Pig” by the Hong Kong press for his unimpressive intellect, and a heretofore supporting actor, C. Y. Leung, nicknamed “Wolf” for his perceived chilly ruthlessness, were the entire cast.
Both men have impeccable pro-China credentials, a prerequisite to becoming CE. While there is a third, pro-democracy, candidate standing somewhere in the wings, he doesn’t stand a chance, because China would never allow him to get the 601 votes needed to win.
Tang, the preferred candidate of the local business elite and the civil service he once headed, promises to preserve the status quo, which is music to the ears of Hong Kong’s “haves.” But a plot twist has complicated his shoo-in campaign, with both Tang and Leung now improvising their lines – peppered with frequent insults – and each consulting the director (China) at every turn.
At the same time, the audience, the people of Hong Kong, are howling, hissing, and throwing bottles at everyone on stage – and sometimes at each other. So, what was supposed to be a boring bit of set-piece theater has become a sensational hit.
Tang, the mild-mannered scion of a textile magnate whose father is a confidant of China’s former leader, Jiang Zemin, committed two elementary mistakes. The first was not confessing quickly enough to his having mistresses, one of whom has a college-age offspring whose father is probably Tang. Of course, Hong Kong’s citizens are far from being puritans, and the sex lives of their leaders are not a primary concern. But they also understand that anyone running for office should have been prepared for such revelations.
Tang was not. Instead, it was left to the tabloids to reveal his mistresses, one by one, week after week, like peeling an onion in front of his wife, Hong Kong’s people, and the Chinese leadership.
The second error was even more inane. Local papers discovered that he had illegally built a large, deluxe wine cellar with a spa beneath one of his mansions. As a senior public servant, he knew that the construction was illegal, and that he should have taken remedial steps to legalize his actions or to abandon it – a matter merely of money, of which he has plenty.
To everyone’s disbelief, Tang insisted that he did not have a wine cellar, just a storage room. Then he trotted out his already-humiliated wife, half in tears, to face the press, blaming her for building the cellar without his prior knowledge while “gallantly” assuming responsibility.
Tang’s popularity sank, and headed towards single digits. If China still insists on anointing him, more mayhem is likely to follow.
Leung, however, is also a deeply divisive figure – a man who comes across as someone waiting to settle scores, though no one really knows which ones. Hong Kong’s tycoons, press, intelligentsia, and civil servants, who normally agree on little, find themselves in complete agreement where Leung is concerned: they do not want him as Hong Kong’s next leader, despite his favorable popularity ratings.
The tycoons fear that Leung’s deeply old-fashioned communist values would hurt their oligopolies. The press finds him evasive. The intelligentsia is wary of him as an underground Communist Party member, something that he has denied. And civil servants believe that Leung harbors resentment of Hong Kong’s British colonial legacy, of which the civil service is the most visible.
Not even senior Communist officials in charge of the Hong Kong portfolio wanted Leung, despite his being a suspected “sleeper” cadre in the territory. Locally recruited members do not enjoy seniority in the 70-million-strong Chinese Communist Party. So, if Leung became Hong Kong’s CE, he would jump ahead of many of his seniors in China.
To complicate China’s predicament further, Hong Kong’s next leader will assume office tainted by retiring CE Donald Tsang’s undignified and possibly corrupt links with the city’s tycoons. The press calls him the “petty greedy CE.” Some legislators have called for his impeachment before he leaves office.
Tsang has been a beneficiary of favors by some of Hong Kong’s second-tier billionaires who run regulated businesses, such as radio stations and the cross-harbor tunnels. Sir Donald enjoys riding on their private jets and luxury yachts while on personal holidays abroad. Before he was shamed into giving it up, he rented a triplex penthouse for his retirement, leased to him at below-market rates by a wealthy businessman, who reportedly threw in a couple of million dollars worth of interior decoration.
Hong Kong’s citizens expect their leader to be a fair arbiter of conflicting public and private interests, not an obsequious toady to the rich. But the most pathetic aspect of Tsang’s behavior is his failure to understand that Hong Kong’s rich, whose company he pathologically craved to keep, respect only those who are richer, smarter, and perhaps more ruthless than they are. They despise those who lack serious money and can be seduced by breadcrumbs.
Deng Xiaoping promised “one country, two systems” as he negotiated Hong Kong’s return to China three decades ago. But, because China has never succeeded in overcoming its inner control freak, it has backed leaders who are incompetent, corruptible, or universally feared and scorned. Hong Kong’s upcoming “election” will be no different.

BANGKOK – The two-month siege of downtown Bangkok by the so-called “Red Shirts” has ended in bloodshed. More than 60 people, including two foreign reporters and a few soldiers, died in the Thai army’s suppression of the urban rebellion.
The Thai government had no choice but to use force after negotiations with the protestors broke down. Both sides deeply mistrusted the other, even though the government’s five-point “road map” for a peaceful resolution implicitly acknowledged the existence of serious socioeconomic problems and included an early general election this November – a concession to the protestors, who argue that the government lacks legitimacy because it was never elected.
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Much of Thailand is now under an all-night curfew, imposed after radical Red Shirts set fire to more than 35 landmark buildings in Bangkok. The militants’ targets included branches of Bangkok Bank, the country’s largest and a pillar of the establishment; Siam Square, owned by the Palace; and a deluxe shopping mall owned by one of the richest Thai Chinese families.
That anarchic fury reflected the disappointment of radicals at their leaders for prematurely surrendering to the authorities rather than fighting to their last breath. Those who did not surrender wanted to show their defiance. The fires were also a volcanic outburst of class hatred by the disenfranchised, rural and urban, against the Bangkok-based wealthy ruling class.
That class is an interlocking network of millionaire generals, big-business owners and their marriage-linked clans, and the Palace, an institution protected by lèse majesté laws that carry severe penalties.
The ruling elite, whose public face at present is the attractive, mild-mannered, Oxford-educated prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, is pinning all the troubles on one man, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, exiled abroad and a fugitive from Thai justice. In this narrative, Thaksin masterminded the siege by hiring a small group of rogue army officers, and by paying the poor to go to Bangkok to start a civil war.
It is entirely plausible that Thaksin did help finance the protest. It is also likely that some radical hot heads wanted to overthrow the government by mob action. But to insist that protesters, old and young, fathers and mothers, numbering as many as 150,000, were willing to risk their lives sitting under a scorching Tropical sun for two months only for money strains credulity. That the elite believes this story is one indication of just how condescending and out-of-touch its members are.
Many in the elite have even turned their ire at foreign news media for allegedly distorting the truth by overplaying the protesters’ grievances. CNN and BBC have been attacked for their alleged bias in showing the “human side” of the protesters and giving insufficient time to the uglier aspects. Both outlets ran live broadcasts throughout the protest, showing all the drama that the cameras could capture.
While official “spin control” is in full throttle, a growing number of thoughtful analysts are voicing concern that facile caricatures do not serve Thailand’s interests. After all, the sense of disenfranchisement among voters in the country’s populous north and northeast, as well as among the urban poor, is real. It is not something manufactured by Thaksin. Nor are the peasants so ignorant to be easily conned by a crafty politician promising much delivering little or none.
This patronizing view conveniently ignores the fact that in the last four elections, Thaksin and his allies won by lopsided margins. Thaksin’s rural development policies were clearly welcomed by people who, for the first time, felt connected to the leaders they had elected.
So the ruling elite engineered a coup to secure the power they had failed to win at the ballot box. They then made use of the “Constitutional Court” to ban Thaksin’s party, the largest in the country. But, even as it made Thaksin’s party illegal, the Constitutional Court failed to unearth any evidence of widespread violations. Instead, it ruled on a minor side issue that many claim was based on a retrospective law.
Thailand’s Old Boys Club – generals-turned-politicians, political parties backed by tycoons with an eye on fat government contracts, and that unnameable hereditary institution whose only agenda is to maintain its longevity – has misgoverned the country for the past half-century. Under its stewardship, one of Asia’s more promising economies has instead become a borderline failed state, enervated by 17 coups since World War II.
Few who now hold the reins of power in Bangkok could honestly throw the first stones. Yet they do.
A peaceful resolution of deep-rooted problems requires wise political leadership, as well as recognition that past injustices cannot be redressed all at once. The art of politics is about skillful compromises, with no side getting exactly what it considers fair and just. But the country’s underclasses must see long-overdue and concrete changes in the right direction – that is, furthering what Thaksin tried to do. In fact, Thaksin may well have to be included in any national reconciliation.
Change is easier promised than accomplished. Unless the ruling elite embrace an honest and earnest effort at national and class reconciliation and soon, Thailand could well descend into a civil war along class lines that would make the turmoil of the past two months in Bangkok seem like a brawl in a bar.

BANGKOK – Thailand’s political and social fabric is fraying. Indeed, the country’s future looks as shaky as it has never been.

In other prosperous democracies, the middle class provides the glue that holds society together. In Thailand, by contrast, the bourgeoisie, centered in Bangkok, is barely emerging as a social and political force.

Instead, for a half-century, an unspoken social contract among four broad groups has held Thailand together: the “Palace” – a euphemism used here to avoid violating draconian lèse majesté laws; big business, the custodian of economic growth; the military, which ensures, first and foremost, the sanctity of the Palace and the moral values it represents; and the common people, mostly rural and urban poor, who accept the rule of the other three estates.

Thailand’s national mythology is that it is a happy Buddhist country, a “land of smiles” bound together by compassion and harmony under the benevolent grace and blessings of the Palace and the generosity of big business. The less fortunate classes are docile, content to accept their subservient roles and satisfied with the social welfare, no matter how skimpy, provided by their betters.

BANGKOK – Thailand’s political and social fabric is fraying. Indeed, the country’s future looks as shaky as it has never been.
In other prosperous democracies, the middle class provides the glue that holds society together. In Thailand, by contrast, the bourgeoisie, centered in Bangkok, is barely emerging as a social and political force.
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Yascha Mounk on the growing instability of liberal democracy – and what Joschka Fischer, Nina Khrushcheva, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and others think should be done about it.

Instead, for a half-century, an unspoken social contract among four broad groups has held Thailand together: the “Palace” – a euphemism used here to avoid violating draconian lèse majesté laws; big business, the custodian of economic growth; the military, which ensures, first and foremost, the sanctity of the Palace and the moral values it represents; and the common people, mostly rural and urban poor, who accept the rule of the other three estates.
Thailand’s national mythology is that it is a happy Buddhist country, a “land of smiles” bound together by compassion and harmony under the benevolent grace and blessings of the Palace and the generosity of big business. The less fortunate classes are docile, content to accept their subservient roles and satisfied with the social welfare, no matter how skimpy, provided by their betters.
The poor and the military hold the Palace in genuine reverence. Palace staff and people in the countryside kneel before the monarchy not merely as a matter of protocol, but out of genuine love and respect.
Forbes magazine ranked the Thai monarchy in 2009 as the richest of all the world’s royals, putting its net worth at $30 billion – a figure that locals consider too low. That royal wealth necessarily entails substantial investments in and with Thai big business in all sectors of the economy. Thailand’s blue-chip firms gain much from direct involvement with the Palace and from social proximity to it. One Hong Kong scion whose wife is from an elite Thai family estimates that perhaps 20 families control most of Thai business.
The Thai military is constitutionally subordinate to civilian leadership, but in reality it owes its allegiance to the Palace. In the current crisis, army generals have told the public that they are reluctant to use force, a position that was not theirs to take.
How long this inactivity will last is anyone’s guess. Mobs wearing red shirts to symbolize their loyalty to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra are now camped out in two major commercial areas, paralyzing a large part of the local economy. They demand that the government dissolve the current legislature immediately, and that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva resign because he was never elected and is viewed as a front man for the traditional anti-Thaksin monied groups.
Many believe that the current crisis will pass, and that Thailand will revert to its historical harmony among the four groups. But this view ignores the country’s new political dynamics.
First and foremost, Thailand’s lower classes have decided that docility is a thing of the past. They are angry and frustrated by the status quo. Save for the handouts they got under Thaksin, they benefited little from the economic growth of the past three decades. The vast gap between the urban rich and the rest has grown worse over the years, with no discernible “trickle-down” effect.
Even in the prime commercial districts and chic neighborhoods of Bangkok, the nation’s richest city, a short walk reveals miles of cracked pavements, piles of uncollected garbage, and rats scurrying freely. Such wrenching sights are typically accompanied by the pungent odor of a sewage system that is more a problem than a solution, especially during the rainy season.
The sight of run-down physical infrastructure, punctuated by super-modern shopping malls with global consumer brand names well beyond the purchasing power of most citizens, is not what you would expect in an economy once described as a potential Asian Dragon. The wealthy dwell in air-conditioned houses, travel in chauffeur-driven cars, and shop in luxury malls, apparently oblivious to how the rest of the country lives. Poor rural families see too many of their children become prostitutes in order to survive.
The poor view the coup against Thaksin of 2006, and the later disbanding of his party, as revenge by the traditional elites who wanted the old ways back, and who would get what they wanted by force since they could no longer get it through the ballot box. It is a view that is not entirely wrong.
In late 2008, anti-Thaksin mobs wearing yellow shirts and led by prominent business figures occupied Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport with impunity, seeking to annul the result of a general election in which pro-Thaksin forces gained power, despite Thaksin’s exile overseas. Yellow is the color of Thai royalty, and the Palace was believed to be sympathetic to the mobs.
Now Thaksin loyalists – the “red shirts” – are doing much the same, demanding change through mob behavior. They believe that they, too, are entitled to act with impunity. The red shirts are not blind to Thaksin’s excessive corruption. But they see him as a rare Thai politician who actually bothered to connect with them. Moreover, as prime minister, Thaksin made a point of delivering much-needed services to the underclasses: subsidized medical care and micro-loans to name just two.
But the unspoken issue behind Thailand’s unrest is that, with the country’s 82-year-old king ailing, the Palace’s moral force has come into question. Indeed, Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Pirmoya, breaking taboos that have governed the country for years, recently spoke about the need to re-examine the country’s lèse majesté laws so that public discourse could intelligently address the role of the Palace in Thailand’s future.
What Thaksin did for the poor required only political self-interest. Yet even that elementary wisdom has never occurred to traditional ruling elites too set in their myopic and arrogant ways. Until it does, Thailand’s otherwise promising future will be increasingly remote.