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BAN RAK THAI, Thailand — The scene does not look at first like your typical tourist draw: rotting weapons, faded battlefield photos and rough-sketched jungle maps, the remnants of a little-remembered Cold War force of exiled, U.S.-equipped Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) guerrillas battling a losing, rearguard war against the new Communist regime in Beijing.
The KMT and China stopped killing each other decades ago, but the descendants of the anti-communist KMT families here say they are thankful to their former foe for boosting the local economy. Today, the KMT’s descendants graciously welcome China’s fun-seeking tourists, sheltering them in cozy, Chinese-themed hotels and plying them with locally grown, fermented oolong tea.
An estimated 200,000 Chinese with Yunnan origins live in more than 100 villages scattered across the northern provinces of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, plus here in Mae Hong Son province. In a massive historical irony, KMT families say they are now grateful to their once mortal enemies for boosting the local economy.
But the tourist trade here also tells a larger story: The traumatic reversals in fortune on both sides display the way China’s monetized soft power is wielding growing influence in this strategic Southeast Asian country.
“Some Chinese come here and see these things, and say they are sorry for the way the KMT were treated so hard, years ago,” said Wang Ja Da, gesturing inside his thatch-roofed restaurant at shelves displaying his family’s rusty, decrepit machine gun alongside metal helmets, canteens, ammunition cartridge boxes and other KMT equipment.
The dusty display is dotted with photos of armed, uniformed KMT fighters who did not survive.
“Because of China’s soft power, some KMT Chinese in northern Thailand have gradually shifted their position from being pro-Taipei to being pro-Beijing,” said ThinkChina, a Singapore-based, English-language news site.
Chinese clout
Thailand has long been a key U.S. ally in the region, but China’s growing economic pull and security muscle have clearly been felt in Bangkok. Look around and one can see how China’s cultural and economic soft power appears in other, subtle ways.
Many ethnic Chinese-Thai parents — and some non-Chinese Thais — now send their children to private language schools for their first four years of schooling to learn Mandarin, preparing for possible careers dealing with Chinese investors, officials and others.
Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes have been a source of controversy in the United States, but here dozens of the centers are seeded around the country, sponsored by China’s National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. Open to the public, they promote Chinese language, culture, and festivals, and teach locals to become teachers, although critics also say they give a sanitized picture of China and suppress dissident viewpoints.
Confucius Institute classes for Thai officials included “Anti-corruption Bureau Chinese class;” “Immigration Bureau Chinese class;” “Parliament Chinese class;” and “advanced Chinese classes for government officials,” said a report titled, “Confucius Institute in Sino-Thai Relations: A Display of China’s Soft Power,” by Singapore’s National University.
“Through the introduction of [Confucius Institutes], some Thai companies can find a reliable go-between to facilitate trade with Chinese companies. These programs garnered the support of the Thai government, the Thai royal family and local businesspeople in that they equate [the institutes] to a strategic and economic tool,” according to the report.
China-based high-tech telecommunications leader Huawei, which faces severe headwinds in the U.S. and many Western markets, operates a 5G telecommunications network that is thriving in Thailand, openly welcomed by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s administration.
In Bangkok meanwhile, a new generation of Chinese immigrants have been arriving overland from Yunnan, Sichuan and other landlocked provinces.
These so-called “overland Chinese” or “overland Yunnanese” are a different ethnic trend compared to previous centuries, when most Chinese came to what was then known as Siam by sea from China’s southeast coast.
The ancestors of many modern-day Thais left China during those centuries of trade and calamities, creating politically and commercially successful Chinese-Thai families.
Those settlers also created Bangkok’s Chinatown 200 years ago along the Chao Phraya River, building “go-down” warehouses and “shop-houses” for international imports and exports.
Thai governments depended on their ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs to help the economy weather international financial upheavals, especially during the 20th century. Today, Chinatown’s real estate and the tourist-thronged maze of densely-built neighborhoods are too pricey for many recent arrivals.
Newcomers instead are carving what they hope will become a “new Chinatown” along the nondescript, two-lane Pracha Rat Bamphen Road. The strip in Bangkok’s Huai Khwang neighborhood offers Yunnan and Sichuan cuisine — hard to find among Chinatown’s mostly Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka, and Cantonese restaurants.
Arriving Chinese immigrants and tourists are also attracted by the neighborhood’s less expensive hotels, apartments and offices, enabling them to do business, intermarry and study — conveniently near the Chinese Embassy.
Another form of Beijing’s soft power is through its government-controlled People’s Daily media supplements, occasionally appearing in the English-language Bangkok Post and offering a reliably positive spin on China’s inevitably practical, peaceful and profitable plans and policies.
China’s charm offensive has been so extensive that the Pentagon is voicing rising concern about whose side Thailand — a war-tested treaty ally — will take if a U.S.-China war erupts in the region over such issues as Taiwan or territorial claims to the South China Sea.
Leery of being dragged into a superpower title fight, Mr. Prayuth’s government has tried to project a neutral stance between the two countries.
Wooing the Thais
Soft power is set to take an increasingly larger role in the superpower wooing of Bangkok.
“The two aspects of soft power that come immediately to mind concern American products and Chinese tourists,” said Benjamin Zawacki, Bangkok-based American author of “Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the U.S. and a Rising China.”
“But while Thais overwhelmingly consume American products — Starbucks coffee, Facebook, Marvel movies, Nike sneakers, Taylor Swift — and criticize Chinese tourists as being disorderly, it is hardly clear that such raises Thai public, or elite, opinion about the U.S. or lowers it about China,” Mr. Zawacki said in an interview.
When Mao’s Communist forces won China’s civil war in 1949, most anti-communist KMT fled to Taiwan, led by U.S.-backed Gen. Chiang Kai-shek. Washington also supported a trapped KMT “Lost Army” made up of 93rd Division stragglers who retreated southwest across the border into Myanmar — then known as Burma — near Thailand’s frontier.
From makeshift KMT bases inside Myanmar, the rebels launched futile cross-border assaults into southern China’s Yunnan province during 1949–61, aided by the CIA.
Today, that little-known Cold War sideshow is attracting tourists from the People’s Republic of China.
“This radio is from the Americans,” Mr. Ja Da said, indicating a green rectangle of dust-covered, dial-studded, antique technology.
“My father was a KMT fighter. I was too young, so I was a radio messenger, running on foot from radio towers to wherever the KMT was, to deliver the messages,” he said, because the nationalist guerrillas lacked enough portable “military wireless phones.”
In 1950, Thai Police Gen. Phao Siyanon “allowed CIA planes to refuel in Thailand, and personally transported the first shipment of arms to the [KMT] Nationalists in Burma, bordering Yunnan,” Mr. Zawacki wrote in his book. “Three invasions were attempted through August 1951.”
In 1956, “Thailand also accused the Nationalists — still assisted by the CIA — of illegally obtaining weapons and funds,” Mr. Zawacki wrote.
Some KMT operatives smuggled opium sap grown in Myanmar’s Shan state — the heart of the narcotic-rich Golden Triangle where the porous borders of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos meet. Armed KMT mule convoys guarding heavy bags of opium — strapped to saddles of wood, leather, and canvas — slid into northwest Thailand’s chunk of the Golden Triangle, before China’s regime pressed the Myanmar officials to oust the KMT.
So the rebels and their families fled here to Ban Rak Thai — less than one mile from Myanmar — and other northern Thai mountain villages in the 1950s and early 60s. Opium smuggling continued and poppy-growing spread in the steep mountains of northwest Thailand’s chunk of the Golden Triangle.
Eventually, Thai officials instructed the estimated 200 KMT families to grow tea and other legal, cool-climate crops.
In exchange, Thailand allowed the KMT suvivors to settle, initially to guard the region against suspected Communist Party of Thailand members and subversive minority ethnic tribes during the 1960s and 1970s.
Today, Thailand’s tourism industry touts 5.900-foot-high Ban Rak Thai as a nostalgia-themed echo of the KMT’s long-lost Yunnan province. Tourists from Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere marvel at mock-vintage stone architecture built, a quaint replica of Yunnan’s traditional villages.
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