The Bangkok Bubble – Soft Power in International Media

The bar at The Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok, 2019 -- image via X

By Kay Young

Since the American War on Vietnam, Bangkok has been a key hub for international journalists and academics in Southeast Asia. It offers modern infrastructure, easy travel, and a high quality of life, allowing them to chopper into the periphery and return home for drinks. These advantages foster a professional environment removed from the region it purports to cover. Western expatriates operate engulfed within a certain elite social and informational milieu, often resulting in confused, racially essentialist coverage aligning with the interests of the moneyed Bangkok elite.

This was clear during the past six months since the outbreak of the border war with Cambodia last year. This triggered a judicial coup against left-populist PM Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the installation of Ultra-Right leader Anutin Charnvirakul, the dissolution of parliament, and elections scheduled for 8 February. Foreign correspondents have seemed bemused, writing contradictory pieces. Analysis like BBC’s Jonathan Head’s, citing how much “we just don’t know,” boils mass class-struggle in a country of over 70 million down to simple elite factional rivalries (as is the case with the conflict with Cambodia) and often parrots the Thai elite line.

If ignorance is one component, another is racial essentialism. The BBC even published a guide of essential racial generalisations in the region. Such analysis is chauvinistic, imperialist, and fundamentally racist. Chief BBC Correspondent Jonathan Head, based in Bangkok for 20 years, exemplifies this; of course he “just doesn’t know” what’s going on, he can’t even speak the language. Meanwhile, any Thai person somewhat versed in socio-political history knows how much we indeed do know.

Unlike cleaner Singapore or more tightly regulated Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok has an aesthetic grit; a few slums, open sex work, and street vendors remain. Said vendors often speak basic English, while the elites they rely on are fluent. This allows the foreign correspondent the thrill of an edgy, orientalised posting without learning the language or developing a non-Bangkok-centric critique. This network becomes a closed informational loop, dependent on interpreters and fixers from the same consensus, unable to seek dissenting viewpoints outside this circuit.

The G.I Era

Since the 1950s, Thailand has been a safe Western ally, developed into an anti-communist bulwark for attacks on revolutionary movements in China & Indochina. During America’s war on Vietnam, academics were also shipped to Bangkok to develop experimental counterinsurgency projects. As detailed in Anthropology Goes to War, one academic said, “Working in Thailand is like working in Vietnam, except no one is shooting at us.”

G.I Era Bangkok was a hub from which the region was pimped out to grotesque paternalist Western interests and desires: Political capital, bars, drugs and women. It was a place of both soft and hard power—as researcher Cynthia Enloe chronicled, detailing the use of Asian women by Western men as objects of political and economic capital. Today it still functionally exists, as western journalists do overpriced cocaine in Ari district bars with their local girlfriends patiently waiting out front.

Long after the anti-communist wars, this dynamic remained. Institutions like The Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok (which Jonathan Head chaired) still play a vital soft power role for the Bangkok elite and Western powers. Within these walls, Western and elite Thai journalists rub shoulders, speak English, and amplify their echo chamber.

Censorship

Without learning the language and history, Thailand is a difficult country to cover. State censorship has been constant since the 1950s; books have been burnt and writers of critical histories disappeared. English sources on anti-communist state mass-killings during the 1960s-70s are predominantly written by the American academics who took part in the acts. Basic sources like Wikipedia are compromised by Thai state agencies like the Cyberscouts, who promote pro-monarchy content and censor critiques, bleeding into both academia and journalism. Critique of the monarchy is banned and punishable by lengthy jail sentences; critical international publications find staff work visas revoked.

This dynamic directly has consequences on the reporting. The country’s deep economic disparities, felt most acutely outside the capital, are covered sporadically, if at all. Chronic oppression and struggle are reduced to simplified narratives of protest and crackdown, missing the underlying social and economic conflicts or political agency -particularly as it pertains to the peasant classes. This is how English-language narratives of class conflict are flattened into interpersonal elite disputes.

Even speaking some Thai, the censorship applies. Critical records are hard to come by. One must be embedded in communities outside Bangkok to hear histories first or second hand. This is why someone like Jit Phumisak, the radical historian killed in the 1960s, is so celebrated for breaking the elite consensus. Despite his popularity domestically, little of his work is translated or accessible. The few Thai writers who have left, outside the reach of censors, have inevitably passed through Western academia, further compromising their critique.

A Flat Narrative

This insulated model benefits Thailand’s elite power holders; the political, monarchic, military, and business elite in Bangkok. They provide reliable access in English, framing events to emphasise simplicity, stability and legitimacy. By interacting only with this group, the media adopts its framing. A political crisis is presented as a temporary disturbance, whilst deeply rooted structural class antagonisms are downplayed as routine challenges of development. English language reportage of the country and the wider region thus has a persistent pro-Bangkok bias, whether the writers know it or not.

The outcome is a soft power advantage for the status quo. The elite secures favourable international portrayal, while journalism’s critical function is inverted. The press, focused on maintaining access and visas, fails to interrogate the forces shaping the nation. The number of English language writers who critically cover the Kingdom is countable on one hand; the names Tyrell Haberkorn and Claudio Sopranzetti come to mind.

So much of Thai history is open-secrets known by the majority, the rural poor, but remains inaccessible to the Foreign Correspondents Club. To learn them, you must speak Thai, leave Bangkok, be in the villages, learn the meta-language of state repression, learn to read the room and gain confidence. Even then, censorship remains, and a small clutch of Western journalists like Andrew MacGregor Marshall and academics have faced severe backlash for their reporting. Largely, this is a risk most would rather not run, when they could instead wake up in their Ari condo, attend a Correspondents Club talk, eat street food with their local girlfriend, go to a Sukhumvit bar, and order pizza delivery, feeling very worldly in the process. Bangkok’s allure is undeniable, so too is the outcome: a flat, muddled image of the country rife with generalisation where class struggle and the aspirations of the poor do not exist.

Kay Young is a writer and editor at DinDeng journal (Thailand). He has a forthcoming book on Thai revolutionary history with LeftWord Books (India).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.