There are various interpretations on the origins of the Cold War (1945–91). According to the historian Mike Sewell, if historiography tends to situate the causes of the East–West confrontation in the events that occurred after the Second World War, some authors trace its origins back to the Russian Revolution of 1917.Footnote 1 These historians have emphasised the ideological antagonism between President Woodrow Wilson and Lenin, the role of the White Russian communities in exile in the main European cities and the American, British, and French attempts to isolate the USSR and support anti-Bolshevik forces.Footnote 2 Another historian for whom the origins of the Cold War date back to the Russian Revolution, Denna F. Fleming, pointed out that the Bolsheviks’ nationalisation of industry, business and land was the main reason for lasting hostility to the Soviet Union: ‘That is why the Russian Revolution shocked the world as no one had ever done and divided it as never before.’Footnote 3
In the Asian context, the Japanese historian Akira Iriye also locates the origins of the Cold War before the Second World War, in the dismantling of the old international order in Asia — dominated by Great Britain and Japan until the end of the 1920s — and in Tokyo's expansionist policy in the 1930s. After Japan's defeat in 1945, growing Communist success in China made the United States determined to restore the economic power of its former adversary in Asia and increase US influence in Southeast Asia. Beginning in 1949, the US State Department did not intend to tolerate any further expansion of communism in Asia.Footnote 4 This analysis was echoed by the historian Yano Tôru who also traces the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia to the Japanese expansionism of the late 1930s and, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the defeat of the nationalists in China. The latter event led the United States to take a new look at the nature of communism in Asia and to consider Southeast Asia as a region with a common political destiny.Footnote 5 In collective works on the Cold War in Southeast Asia, historians emphasise the importance of the decolonisation process in its origins.Footnote 6 With regards to Thailand, Phuongthong Phawakkhraphan's work on Thai foreign policy during the Cold War clearly situates its origins in the aftermath of the war.Footnote 7 From these analyses, the Cold War in Southeast Asia has its origins in the changes wrought by the Japanese Occupation, the resultant weakening of the European colonial powers, and the consequent development of American, Chinese and Soviet influence in the region. Most historians see the origins of the Cold War in Asia, and more particularly in Southeast Asia, in the events that followed Japan's surrender, marked by the development of national independence movements.
The most recent and perhaps most influential precursor for the present study is Ang Cheng Guan's Southeast Asia's Cold War: An interpretive history,Footnote 8 which details the region's unique position in requiring a Cold War history of its own. Because much of Southeast Asia had been colonised and gained independence through the course of the Cold War, the latter cannot be adequately understood separately from the narratives of decolonisation and nation-building. In short, since the conflict between socialist and nationalist movements against imperialist domination played such a significant role in the rise of nationalism in Southeast Asia, it would not make sense to try to separate the origins of the Cold War in this region from the earlier narratives of colonisation and decolonisation.
If the Cold War in Southeast Asia is to be interpreted as an integral part of decolonisation and an important phase of the emergence of modern nation-states from the postwar ruins of empires, the position of Siam (or Thailand as it came to be known since 1939), the only marginally independent Southeast Asian state in the colonial alliance against communism prior to and during the Second World War, needs to be reinvestigated. That is, if the regional cooperative attempts to suppress communism originated and were driven by colonialist objectives, communist movements in Southeast Asia were, at least from the point of view of European colonisers, anti-colonial and some, if not all, related to nationalist movements and nation-building efforts in many of the colonies. The Siamese absolutist regime's support for colonial anti-communist efforts from the late 1910s through the 1920s is evidence of the colonial nature of the pre-1932 government: popular uprisings appeared to be a greater threat to Siam than European imperialism.Footnote 9 Moreover, the return of a heavy-handed anti-communist policy backed by the United States — another superpower from the West — signified the continuation of elite rule through colonial configurations long after the Second World War and throughout the Cold War.Footnote 10
To propose that the origins of the Cold War in Asia should be moved back from the late 1940s to as early as the 1920s may initially sound like an outlandish argument. So far we have only tried to establish that there exists some sort of continuity from anti-communist measures in the interwar years that could be considered as an antecedent of the Cold War. To make the great leap forward and argue that the Cold War, at least in Southeast Asia, originated during the interwar years requires a serious reinterpretation of the definition of the global political conflict. More recent scholarship — most notably, Heonik Kwon's Ghosts of war in Vietnam Footnote 11 — questions the general notion of the Cold War as a proxy war where the superpowers acted out their ideological conflicts in smaller battlefields so as to avoid engaging directly in a third world war or triggering a nuclear holocaust. Kwon clearly elaborates how, for the people of Southeast Asia who were caught in the crossfires of the Vietnam War, the war was very real, with death tolls that surpassed those of many major battlegrounds in both world wars. For the Vietnamese, the centre of the narrative of Cold War history most definitely should not be located in East Germany or Cuba. The Cold War in Vietnam through the narrative of Ghosts of war in Vietnam is perceived much more as a civil war than a proxy war of the American/Eurocentric perspective. It was a war that was to a great extent fought among the people of Vietnam and many causes of its outbreak are located in the former Indochina.
To add to this line of interpretation, Tuong Vu points out in the introductory chapter of Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, identity and culture,Footnote 12 that even much of the ideological perspective on the Cold War in Asia could be traced back to regional origins. North Vietnamese communist leaders were devoted to the socialist cause long before they started to receive support from the Soviet Union, while anti-communist civil bodies had been active in South Vietnam prior to the United States’ entrance into the war. A similar argument could be made of the conflict between the pro-imperialist absolutist regime of Siam and the national revolutionaries who staged the revolution that supposedly transformed the nation from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy in 1932.Footnote 13 The main conflict of the Cold War in Thailand could be understood as simply a continuation of this earlier interwar struggle. Given such perspectives, the proposal that the Cold War in Southeast Asia originated in the interwar years becomes more plausible.
In this sense the Cold War, at least in Southeast Asia, originated in political struggles between groups adhering to different ideologies and conflicting ideas about decolonisation and nation-building. These domestic clashes over visions for a future nation emerged alongside the rise of nationalism among the Southeast Asian masses in the early twentieth century. With the conclusion of the First World War and novel concepts like ‘self-determination’, as eloquently presented by President Wilson in his Fourteen Points proposal for a more enduring peace, the struggles among different visions of self-rule within the Southeast Asian colonies and one semi-colony (that is, Siam) heightened when each faction attempted to manipulate support and intervention from superpowers, be they colonial regimes or the international socialist networks that had been rapidly expanding since the establishment of the Soviet Union. This series of decolonising and nation-building domestic conflicts, which drew interventions and involvements from external powers across Southeast Asia, began during the interwar years, and continued through the Second World War and up to the tail end of the twentieth century, when at least one of the major powers ceased to exist, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.Footnote 14
In addition to local dynamics, it should be remembered, with regard to Western motivations in general and to those of France in particular, that the outbreak of the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik victory resulted, as pointed out by the great historian of Russia Marc Ferro, in the intervention of at least a dozen foreign powers including the United States, Japan, Great Britain and France. Between the West and the East, it was then anything but a cold conflict.Footnote 15
As in the Cold War, there were episodes of appeasement and episodes of increased friction. As Michael Carley recounts, after 1921, relations between the USSR and the Western powers eased: ‘Germany recognized the Soviet government in April 1922, Great Britain in February 1924, and France in October 1924’, and that ‘[d]uring the following three years the French and Soviet governments tried to resolve outstanding differences, most importantly, the issue of tsarist debts to French investors repudiated by the Bolsheviks in 1918’. The Franco-Soviet conference began in Paris in February 1926 to deal with this and other issues. However, this attempt at settlement ‘was blocked in September-October 1927 by a spectacular anti-communist press campaign in Paris, inspired by the French Interior Minister, Albert Sarraut, and subsidized by Royal Dutch Shell oil magnate Sir Henri Deterding’. This led the Soviet ambassador to leave the French capital and ‘effectively ended the Franco-Soviet conference of Paris’. And Great Britain went so far as to sever diplomatic relations with the USSR.Footnote 16 According to Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Berstein, anti-communism remained at a ‘high level’ in France in the 1920s. In 1927, Sarraut was able to proclaim: ‘Communism, here is the enemy!’Footnote 17 Sarraut's attitude and role are all the more interesting, as he had twice been governor general of Indochina (1911–13 and 1917–19). The conflicting relations between France and the USSR, although fluctuating, resulted outside Europe in an anti-communist policy aimed at preserving the colonial status quo.
The archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledge the concerted projects against communism among the main regimes of Southeast Asia dating back to the mid-1920s. Such efforts show the continuity between the anti-communism of the interwar period through to the post-Second World War era. Focusing on the case of Siam and its relations with the imperial powers, this article shows how in Thailand anti-communist policies before the Second World War anticipated the early Cold War policies. The case of Siam, and its participation in this repressive enterprise, is also interesting in that it reflects the integration of the Thai elite into the imperialist structures of Southeast Asia, whether they were Franco-British, Japanese or American. This article will focus first on the origins of international cooperation against communism in Southeast Asia, then on the Franco-Siamese agreement of 1928, and finally on the continuity between this period and the two following decades.
The first international anti-communist projects in Southeast Asia
The ‘containment’ of communism in Southeast Asia was not a post-Second World War invention of the United States. The context of Siamese cooperation in the fight against communism during the interwar period was the growing fear among the colonial powers in the face of the development of communism.
In the aftermath of the First World War and the founding of the Soviet Union, the communist question, linked to that of the maintenance of colonial rule in Southeast Asia, was an important concern among European leaders. As the historian Nicolas Tarling wrote, ensuring the subjugation of the dominated had both an external and an internal aspect. According to Tarling, it was a kind of international or inter-colonial question. The European authorities intended to cut off their subjects from possible external support and make the overthrow of colonial power unthinkable. Old colonial rivalries seemed to give way to a form of solidarity and prevention against communism was seen as a common task.Footnote 18 Siam, which had supported the Allies in the First World War, had refrained from recognising the Bolshevik regime following the Russian Revolution in 1917 in solidarity with Britain and France. Through much of the interwar years, even after some European allies had started to recognise the Soviet Union, the Siamese elite continued to keep their distance from the USSR due to their fear of communism throughout the remaining absolutist era.Footnote 19
In 1925, a French Minister of the Colonies considered that the ‘disorders’ affecting European overseas territories were caused by the ‘soviets’ alone. In a document addressed to his colleague at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the minister declared that it was following ‘so to speak day by day’ the propaganda work of the revolutionary organisations, arguing that there was no doubt that the USSR was supporting these activities. The ‘reds’ were everywhere at work: in China and particularly in Guangzhou; in Japan; in the Netherlands Indies; and in South Africa with the Rand Revolt. They were likewise the cause of the ‘worries of the Belgian government for its colony of Congo’. Against the French possessions in Asia, the ‘Bolsheviks’ were at work among the Annamese refugees in China and present in the metropolis. They offered training at Moscow's ‘propaganda school’ for ‘agitators’ such as Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh).Footnote 20
Faced with what was presented as a Bolshevik threat, the European authorities envisaged, as early as the mid-1920s, the establishment of a common anti-communist front. In the autumn of 1924, the Belgian government expressed ‘to the Dutch government the desire to see the States whose possessions [were] targeted by Bolshevik propaganda protect each other against this danger’.Footnote 21 Put aside for a moment, the question of a ‘joint action’ resurfaced with a warning to the British authorities by Brussels against a propaganda campaign that threatened the English, French and Belgian colonies. Following this, when the governor of Nigeria informed the lieutenant-governor of Dahomey regarding the matter, the latter was authorised by Édouard Daladier, in a letter of 24 March 1925, ‘to exchange with the authorities of Lagos information that would be collected locally’.Footnote 22
In Southeast Asia the idea of a ‘joint action’ against Bolshevism seems to have come first from the Dutch. In fact, the Netherlands Indies had been engaged since the end of the 1910s in the repression of communism. And the situation in the Dutch possessions indicated well enough the urgency of the situation for the Indies authorities as well as for its neighbours.
Socialist ideas had been introduced into the archipelago by the Dutch J.T. Brandsteder, H.W. Dekker and H.J.M. Sneevliet,Footnote 23 who in 1914 founded the Indische Sociaal-Democratische Vereeniging (ISDV) in Surabaya.Footnote 24 The revolutionary developments that Russia experienced from 1917 marked the beginning of the repression of socialist and communist activities in the Indies. ‘Late in 1917 [the ISDV] had gathered 3000 soldiers and sailors into soviets […], mainly in the port city of Surabaya.’Footnote 25 In response, during 1918 and 1919,
the government crushed these soviets, exiled Sneevliet and arrested or exiled most of the other Dutch leaders of the party. As the Dutch radicals disappeared, however, ISDV fell to Indonesian leadership, which would shortly enable it at last to acquire its mass base.Footnote 26
A former civil service official in Java and Madura, ‘attached to the Netherlands Colonial Office’, J.Th. Petrus Blumberger reported that later, in order to eradicate Communism, the government ‘aggravated existing laws’.Footnote 27 Outside the cities, the fight against communism took a violent turn:
In the early 1924 violence in rural Java increased with the appearance of groups called sarekat hijau (green union) […]. These were gangs of thugs, policemen and kyais, encouraged by the Dutch administration and priyayi officials. By early 1925 there were about 20,000 members who attacked PKI and SI meetings and intimidated their members.Footnote 28
In the words of Blumberger, officials in one city in West Java (Sumedang) wanted to ‘direct the anti-communist sentiments of the religious population in the right direction’.Footnote 29 On 21 July 1925, a strike broke out in Semarang, which continued until the end of the year with the support of the Communists.Footnote 30
It was in this context that in mid-1925 the Indies gouverneur-generaal proposed to his counterpart in Indochina the communication of information between the two administrations. The French governor-general was interested and suggested, ‘on the other hand […] a general agreement between the various colonies of the Far East, with a view to the joint exploitation of the investigations and documents concerning the Leninist plots in these regions’.Footnote 31 The French minister of the Colonies reported that ‘several governments would favour the establishment of colonial-led co-operation against revolutionary enterprises’.Footnote 32 To achieve this, he wanted to see the colonial powers present in Africa and Asia reach ‘an agreement as soon as possible’ in order to prevent any development of ‘revolutionary actions’. Hence he proposed an ‘exchange of views’ between governments in order to ‘facilitate the preparation of an agreement’.Footnote 33
The establishment of an international conference to coordinate the fight against Bolshevism, however, posed problems of discretion both vis-à-vis the USSR and colonial populations, especially as the real goal — according to the author of the note — was ‘to defend the interests of the conquering whites against the conquered yellows and blacks’. The Far East Bureau therefore suggested that a meeting be held ‘of the heads of the various police forces of the States concerned’ in Africa and Asia.Footnote 34 All these reflections exchanged between the colonial and foreign affairs ministries show the precocity of the projects of common struggle against ‘Bolshevik activities’.
Franco-Siamese Anti-Communist Cooperation Agreement of 1928
The principle of a ‘joint action’ was of interest not only to the European powers, as Japan's request to the French Government to ‘facilitate the Japanese authorities’ surveillance and prosecution of Korean refugees on the French concession in Shanghai indicates.Footnote 35 The French authorities considered this request acceptable, in return requesting ‘any satisfaction’ that could be given ‘as regards: (1) the sending of the information we are awaiting on the Annamese agitators who had taken refuge in Japan, and (2) the effective arrangements that [the Japanese] police can take to neutralize the action of these Indochinese’. The Indochinese administration subsequently began discussions with the Japanese authorities on this subject.Footnote 36 The Far East Bureau, however, expressed some reservations about Japan's possible attitude. The Japanese had ‘always asked to be helped by the great powers in the repression of Korean nationalist pursuits and there is no doubt that they agree to participate in a common action with regard to their own interests: but it is unlikely that they would keep their commitments when it comes to other Asians’.Footnote 37 The Far East Bureau, however, was more confident about Siam: ‘Our minister in Siam assures that this country would accept beforehand all the proposals that would be made to him in order to fight communist propaganda, so much does it frighten him.’Footnote 38
The Siamese government's fear of communism increased with the events in China in 1927. The wave of repression launched by Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang government on 12 April in Shanghai against trade unionists, leftist militias and communists led to the massacre of five thousand members of the Chinese Communist Party and tens of thousands of union workers. The crackdown spread to provinces around Shanghai, Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, and Beijing.Footnote 39 In Guangzhou more than two thousand people were arrested and fifty to one hundred people killed.Footnote 40 The purges pushed many communists and trade unionists to take refuge overseas.
In reaction, the Siamese government took several steps against them. In its edition of 12 May 1927, which mentioned the arrest of the Chinese communist Ueng Cho Khuang, the Siam Observer announced the publication of a Ministry of the Interior ‘White Book’ dictating the conduct of senior officials in the face of Bolshevik propaganda. The newspaper reported that the Interior Ministry had decided that anyone convicted of spreading propaganda in Siam was destined to be deported. On 22 May 1927, the Council of Ministers set up a study committee on the prohibition of ‘communist and Bolshevik’ propaganda, which would lead to a series of amendments to existing laws aimed at repressing Bolshevism.
At the same time France offered to deepen anti-communist cooperation between Siam and Indochina. The development of Siamese nationalism, initiated under the reign of King Vajiravudh, could have been an obstacle to the implementation of cooperation between the kingdom's police and neighbouring colonial powers. Vajiravudh's concept of Siamese nationalism centred on elements such as the king and religion, as well as elements of exclusion, including of the Chinese, whose economic role was perceived as a threat, and from ‘the end of 19th century and early 20th century’, France. The Siamese ruling classes maintained a certain ‘animosity’ towards this country, which they blamed for the loss of control over part of the Khmer kingdom as well as the Laotian principalities on the right bank of the Mekong.Footnote 41 However, in practical terms, Vajiravudh's brand of royalist nationalism was not anti-colonial per se. The Chakri monarchs from the reign of King Mongkut (Rama IV) to King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) had cultivated close business and political relations with Great Britain and a cooperative network had been established between British Malaya and Siam at the end of the reign of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) to suppress Chinese nationalist activities in secret societies in their realms.Footnote 42
The reservations which the lost provinces produced on Franco-Siamese relations did not, therefore, constitute a sufficient obstacle to a rapprochement between the two countries in the second half of the 1920s. As early as April 1927, the Siamese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Traidos, informed the French Minister in Siam that he wished to ‘receive from the security services of the Governor-General of Indochina all possible information concerning the communist movement’ and assured him of ‘complete reciprocity on the part of the Royal Government’.Footnote 43 This change of attitude is manifested later with ‘the expulsion from the Siamese territory of the Annamese agitator’ Cu Nhon (alias Thay Bay or Hoi Thien) ‘against which the colonial government of Indochina had launched a two-year arrest warrant for a common law crime’.Footnote 44 In the eyes of the French Minister in Bangkok, this gesture of the Siamese government showed their ‘desire to co-operate with all the governments regularly established in Indochina, Insulinde and the Malay Peninsula for the defence of order’.Footnote 45 In July 1927 the French Minister in Siam congratulated himself on the fact that, although in the past the attitude of the Royal Government had been ‘correct but not very eager’, they had now ‘resolutely decided to help us’. This development was due, according to the minister, to an awareness of the ‘too serious’ danger to the monarchy posed by communist ideas.Footnote 46 Clearly, by the late 1920s, the threats posed by the presence of Chinese and Vietnamese communists together with the rising movement among the native population had overcome all concerns regarding the threats posed by European powers to the Siamese royalist regime.
In late 1927 the Governor-General of Indochina Alexandre Varenne announced to the French legation in Bangkok the arrival of George Nadaud, chief of the Indochinese intelligence services (Sûreté générale, General Security), to discuss closer collaboration with the Siamese police.Footnote 47 On 15 November, the French legation announced Nadaud's arrival to Prince Traidos, stating that the former would ‘study the modalities of a closer collaboration between the Royal Police and the General Security of Indochina for the suppression of Communist propaganda in both countries’.Footnote 48 At the end of November, Prince Traidos announced to the French that the Siamese Ministry of the Interior was in ‘complete sympathy with the purpose of Mr. Nadaud's mission’ and requested that he be invited to introduce himself to the Director General of the Provincial Police Department.Footnote 49
The ensuing conversations took place in Bangkok from 22 to 24 November 1927 between Major-General Phraya Adhikarana Prakas, Director of the Bangkok Police Department, the Director General of the Provincial Police and Nadaud. The two main points raised were those of cooperation between the police servicesFootnote 50 and the ‘push-back to Indochina of the Annamese political agitators emigrated in Siam and arrested in this country upon our request’. An agreement was made ‘as to the form in which the requests of the Indochinese general security authority should be addressed’.Footnote 51 The two parties determined the points on which it was necessary for the exchange of information useful to both police departments, and on the manner of proceeding with this exchange. The police cooperation project was aimed specifically at ‘communist agitators’, a formula that extended to the Annamese revolutionaries and members of the nationalist Guomindang.Footnote 52
The Siamese government in particular wanted to be ‘informed by that of Indochina on the actions of communist agents likely to attack the safety of the kingdom and whose services Indochina could have known’.Footnote 53 The Siamese police also wished: to obtain information on the political obedience of the Chinese living in Siam who had previously resided in Indochina; ‘regularly receive identification information, with photographs and fingerprints’ of all Chinese expelled from Indochina for ‘common law crimes’ or ‘administrative action taken as a result of political acts’; ‘to be informed in time to take certain precautionary measures in transit through Saigon and other Indochinese ports or by land’ of Guomindang members and political suspects of all nationalities travelling to Siam. As for the French authorities, they wished to obtain from Siam the ‘collaboration of the high authorities of the Interior in the surveillance of the Annamese centres of revolutionary intrigues’ (in particular, says the note, that of the ‘agricultural colony of Klong-Khu’ in Phichit province); checks on the Vietnamese ‘circulating in transit through Siam, whether they come from Indochina to go to China, or they come back from China to return to Indochina’; information on the departure from Siam, in transit through or to Indochina, of Chinese agitators or suspicious persons of other nationalities. The two parties agreed that ‘individuals sought for “communist actions” [could] be subject to expulsion from the territory of Siam or Indochina and be escorted back to the common border of the two countries’.Footnote 54
On a technical level, it was established that the identification information concerning the CommunistsFootnote 55 who were the subject of requests for surveillance or deportation by either government was to be supplied ‘in the form of the deportation forms’ already used by the Siamese Government with the French Indochinese and British Straits Settlements authorities. Nadaud and Phraya Adhikarana Prakas requested that ‘all communications exchanged between the two police forces go through the regular diplomatic channel, all precautions being taken to ensure their speed and secrecy’.Footnote 56 Addressing the governor-general of Indochina, the French chargé d'affaires in Siam thought that for the application of these anti-communist cooperation measures it was necessary to rely on Phraya Adhikarana Prakas because the director of the provincial police, Prince Kamrob, was less inclined to respond to the French demands. As for the Minister of the Interior, the Prince of Lopburi, the French minister stressed that ‘his action can be exercised only through the general instructions given to the provincial authorities under his department and whose indulgence vis-à-vis agitators in their constituency sometimes resemble complicity’.Footnote 57
Pending the decision on the cooperation between the French and Siamese police, Prince Traidos informed the French chargé d'affaires of the procedure to be followed by the government of Indochina in order to ‘obtain in the easiest way the delivery of individuals wanted by him’. In the case of an ‘individual convicted of communist conduct’, his deportation should be demanded, a procedure which the Siamese Government was ‘in principle disposed to grant whenever it could’. According to the chargé d'affaires, the French authorities had to take into account the intervention of local lawyers, who ‘did not [make] a fault of protesting against a measure of this kind when the evidence on which it rests [did] not seem unconvincing’. The chargé d'affaires also stressed the advantages for the French authorities of recourse to informal processes, believing that the ‘modus vivendi’ in place should ‘give faster results’. Prince Traidos had also pointed out to him ‘the complication and the extreme slowness which led to the settlement of this order of question in the recent agreement which they have concluded with England’. The system then practised was considered preferable as long as there was ‘good will on both sides and in times of crisis’.Footnote 58 Prince Traidos did not express his government's acceptance of the proposals for collaboration until 22 August 1928,Footnote 59 but collaboration between the Siamese and French authorities had begun at the end of 1927.Footnote 60 On his part, the governor-general of Indochina had also approved the Nadaud mission's proposals.Footnote 61
These agreements were called into question more than a year later with the promulgation of an extradition law by Siam on 11 December 1929. The preamble provided for a standardisation of extradition methods to be applied by all requesting countries, but this law did not question the very principle of the cooperation of Siam with the French authorities in the suppression of communism. During a brief visit to Siam in 1931, Paul Reynaud, then Minister of the Colonies, explained to the King of Siam ‘the need for neighbouring states to consult each other with a view to combating communism’. In response, the king instructed his Minister of Foreign Affairs to hand over to Reynaud a memorandum in which the government, while professing its good will, developed the reasons why it was not always possible for it to deliver the individuals demanded.Footnote 62 The memorandum nevertheless recalled that
[T] he Royal Government is fully aware of the vital need to combat communist practices in order to avoid political and social disturbances that [could] be the consequence. [The Royal Government was] therefore perfectly resolved to fight against Communism not only when it [manifested] itself in Siam itself, but also when it [disturbed] neighbouring States, to the extent that circumstances permitted it to support the efforts of these states to control the common enemy.Footnote 63
The French Minister in Siam underlined for his part the ‘effective help’ given in most cases by the Siamese police to the French authorities and specified that the ‘Annamese official’ seconded to the legation ‘to monitor the Annamese refugees in Siam’ (The minister was referring to Do Hung), was ‘on the best terms with the service of safety and business is generally settled discreetly’. The Siamese government also accepted, in ‘certain cases’, to hand over the persons claimed by the French authorities without the latter having to initiate extradition proceedings: ‘They are expelled from Siam, but sent to Indochina where we take delivery.’Footnote 64
The perceived necessities of the struggle against communism, of course, did not erase all the disagreements that existed between governments. This was evidenced, a few months before the visit of King Prajadhipok (Rama VII, r.1925–35) in Indochina, by the remarks made by Prince Amoradat — then head of the Siamese legation in Washington — which included the ruins of Angkor among the tourist sites of Siam. These remarks scandalised the French legation in Bangkok and led to a protest by France at the Siamese Foreign Ministry.Footnote 65 The importance of international cooperation in the fight against communism was nonetheless present in the minds of French and Siamese leaders. Thus, on 15 April 1930, during his visit to Indochina, the King of Siam praised Governor-General Pierre Marie Anton Pasquier for ‘fostering and developing this spirit of cordial cooperation, so useful to the maintenance of social order’.Footnote 66
For Pasquier, Franco-Siamese cooperation was part of a broader context that concerned all of East Asia. The governor-general wanted to see a ‘League of Nations of the Far East’ emerge, and felt that the measures taken at the local level alone were insufficient and it was necessary ‘to join an agreement between nations or threatened colonies’. To this end, he had already established contacts with the various authorities of East Asia: with the Netherlands Indies, from where he had received the ‘best assurances’ for a ‘research and exchange of information collaboration’; with ‘our English friends’; as well as with Japan, with whom he said he had ‘precious relations’. He emphasised the ‘cordiality’ of relations between Indochina and Siam, especially since the sovereign's visit to Indochina. The governor-general was seeking ‘to expand and strengthen this network of defensive friendships where each of the participants [would find], with an immediate security interest, the opportunity for the most diverse exchanges of views: social, scientific, economic’.Footnote 67 Pasquier was not the only one to share these ideas in France. C.A. Le Neveu, author of the preface to Blumberger's book on communism in the Netherlands Indies, and director-general of the French colonial union, wrote in 1929 that:
[T]o better protect ourselves against all these attacks, we must first become fully aware of our colonial unity and help with all our strength, the formation of this ‘international colonial solidarity’ which will maintain order and give to the indigenous ‘that we want to elevate to us’ all the freedom of which they are capable, as they evolve, instead of the slavery in which the agitators would not fail to make them fall again.Footnote 68
It is important to note the particular attitude of the Siamese absolute monarchy in its communications and cooperation with colonial regimes in the suppression of communist movements across Southeast Asia. There appears to be a strong sense that Siam was not like other Southeast Asian countries, that Siam was a sovereign state, and that the Siamese government should be accorded the same treatment as European colonial regimes. This was clearly expressed in King Vajiravudh's participation in the First World War — insisting that Siam contribute only military officers and not labourers in the same way as other Asian colonies, the likes of Korea, Java or Indochina.Footnote 69 Furthermore, ongoing cooperation with British Malaya from the reign of King Chulalongkorn to suppress ‘seditious’ Chinese schools or with the French colonial government in fighting communist movements suggest a kind of solidarity among the ruling classes in keeping the proletariat in check.Footnote 70 This was an anti-communist effort that was not anti-imperialist, which is strikingly different from what may, at face value, appear to be a similar anti-communist effort of the nationalist/anti-imperialist post-1932 constitutional regime, as will be discussed in the next section.
Continuity until the beginning of the Cold War
As we have seen, under the absolute monarchy, the Siamese authorities showed reluctance to hand over to the French authorities Vietnamese nationalist refugees living in the kingdom. In 1930, the Siamese government refused to comply with a French request to extradite Vietnamese who had been arrested by the Siamese in July, in Ban Dong, Phichit province. In his reply to the Legation of France, the Siamese Foreign Minister had indicated that their extradition could not take place until proof of their communist activities had been established. The Siamese government claimed to be ‘opposed to communism, and […] happy to cooperate with its neighbours in the East in suppressing Communists’, but also declared that it was eager to respect international extradition practices. The Siamese foreign minister further emphasised that the principle generally accepted was that extradition could not be granted for offences ‘of a political nature’. In so doing, he excluded communism from the field of politics to circumscribe it to that of crime.Footnote 71 Nonetheless, considering the fact that 1930 was also the year that the Communist Party of Siam was established with significant involvement of Vietnamese communists from Indochina, it is also possible that the arrest of Vietnamese communists in Siam was no longer only a threat to French colonial rule, but also a matter of national security for the Siamese absolutist regime.Footnote 72
The Siamese foreign minister's declaration as well as the Franco-Siamese Agreement of 1928 illustrates the tendency of the Siamese authorities to support the imperialist order in the name of the fight against communism. The Siamese authorities later had a similar attitude toward Japan when it extended its control over the kingdom in the late 1930s and again in the late 1940s, in its relations with the United States at the start of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. There are, however, significant differences in terms of the Siamese political elite who were cooperating with the great powers in the suppression of communist activities from the 1920s, through the Second World War, and into the Cold War years. That is, the anti-communist efforts of the royalist regimes of Vajiravudh and Prajadhipok were not anti-colonial in nature and were supportive of neighbouring colonial regimes. The anti-communist efforts of the post-1932 revolutionary government, on the other hand, though similar in many aspects, were strongly anti-colonial and this was reflected clearly in Thailand's relations with neighbouring nationalist movements during the Second World War.Footnote 73 This anti-colonial effort to suppress communist movements would conclude at the end of the Second World War. With the postwar return of the royalist faction to the forefront of Thai politics, the political elite would return to suppressing the communists in support of great powers — in this case the United States — at the cost of sabotaging the nationalist efforts of Thailand's neighbours.Footnote 74
In the late 1930s, the Siamese government resorted to the theme of the fight against communism while participating in the suppression of the Chinese patriotic movement alongside the Japanese government. In other words, the suppression of ethnic Chinese communists during this period had more to do with supporting Japan's presence in Southeast Asia and Japanese war efforts in China. Hence, the activities of communist suspects in neighbouring countries were more of a threat towards the European colonial powers, which were already clearly against Japan, and therefore, of lower priority to the anti-colonial revolutionary government of Thailand from the late-1930s to the conclusion of the war.
At dawn on Saturday, 12 February 1938, the Siamese police, led by Phra Phichan Phonlakit (Bicharn Bolakich), searched four schools and a shop. According to a French intelligence report, these were: Shuren (Shu Yin, 樹人), located in Sam Pheng, a ‘known communist propaganda house’ where four students had been arrested in 1936 for distributing communist leaflets; Chong Shi (Song Chit, 崇實), located in Saphan Sawang, a ‘known communist propaganda hotbed’; Qiming (Kee Ming, 晵明), or Thiraprasat, located in Saphan Yotse; and Xing Hua (Se Hua, 醒華), located in Phaya Thai. To this list was added the Xin Hua (Sin Hoa, 新華) store, whose address corresponded to that of the SCP Central Committee, which was also raided. The police (santiban) discovered ‘revolutionary and anti-Japanese propaganda documents’ and proceeded to arrest the three main communist leaders of the ‘Anti-Japanese Association for National Salvation’ (Xianluo huaqiao gejie kang Ri jiuguo lianhehui, 暹羅華僑各界抗日救國聯合會, or Kang Liang, 抗聯): Xu Xia (Kou Hiap, 許俠), then 27 years old, Wu Linman (Ngo Lam Mung, 吳琳曼), 32 years old, and Xu Yixin (Kou Yek Sin, 許一新), 30 years old. They were all from Chaozhou and teachers at Qiming school for the first two and ShurenFootnote 75 (or Chong Shi)Footnote 76 for the last.
The French intelligence report also noted the arrests of Jiang Xiaochu (Kong Eau Chon, 江曉初) and Beizi Duan (Pua Chi Tuan, 貝子端). The first, whom the report stated was a 48-year-old Kejia (Hakka), and a doctor, was described by Eiji Murashima as a dentist and a communist in charge of Kang Lian's print materials. The second was a 38-year-old Kejia, and a doctor at the ‘Irish Hospital’. However, Murashima describes him as a male nurse, owner of the hospital Chia Li Sue, located in Sam Yaek, and in charge of sending warning letters from Kang Lian.Footnote 77 Beizi Duan and Jiang Xiaochu are said to have arrived in Siam in 1927 with Xu Xia. Lang Zhude (Long Chu Teck, 廊主徳), 56 years old, head of the Overseas Chinese in Siam for the Elimination of Traitors Anti-Japanese and National Salvation Association, was also arrested. The French report indicated that he was from Chaozhou and a member of the (Ngu) Pai secret society. On the day of their deportations, 29 March 1938, several thousand Chinese were present to accompany them to the port as heroes.Footnote 78
Following this police action, a French intelligence agent asked Phra Phichan Phonlakit ‘why he did not touch Bôi Dân School’, an establishment considered to be the SCP's headquarters. The Thai officer answered that, according to the director general of police, Luang Adun Detcharat, an operation in this establishment was not ‘timely’ and an intervention was planned for later.Footnote 79
The local press announced ‘loudly’ that the government action was aimed at stopping communist and secret society activities in Siam. Newspapers also published an interview with Luang Adun, who declared that he was continuing ‘the work of destroying communist cells not only in the capital but also in the provinces’. However, according to the French agent the arrests were made ‘at the request of the Legation of Japan which closely followed the anti-Japanese activities in the Chinese colony in Siam’. It was ‘in order to conceal from the public that they had to act under pressure of a foreign power that the Siamese authorities [were] careful to publicise the operations they [had] been forced to undertake’.Footnote 80
According to the French agent, the action against the communists was not aimed at the repression of the communist movement because the Siamese police had ‘spared the main extremist agitators [sic] who were known for a long time’. He added that if some members of the SCP had been arrested, such as Xu Yixin and Wu Linman, it was because they had been involved in anti-Japanese activities.Footnote 81 This was a significant difference in the Thai revolutionary government's anti-communism, as opposed to that of the earlier royalist regime. Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram's wartime government was firstly anti-imperialist because it perceived the colonial regimes — especially Great Britain, but also France, to a certain extent — as important allies of the old royalist regime. It is, therefore, not surprising that the constitutional government chose to enter into a formal alliance with Japan during the Second World War while the majority of the underground Free Thai Movement was made up of royalists in exile in the United States and Britain. Phibun's wartime government's anti-communist policy was, by all accounts and in practice, an anti-Chinese policy, implemented primarily to secure Japanese dominance in Southeast Asia — a major part of Thailand's contribution as a leading Japanese ally in the region. This could be seen as the first instance in which the Thai government's communist suppression policy was manipulated so as to gain support from an external power to bolster its domestic political position despite constant challenges from the ancien regime. Japan's defeat at the end of the Second World War would eventually bring the anti-imperialist/nationalist version of the Thai government's communist suppression policy to an end. Phibun, however, managed to return to office despite royalist dominance in the postwar years. He would manipulate his wartime anti-Chinese policies into anti-communist policies as a desperate compromise to gain US support during the first decade of the Cold War.Footnote 82
Following the first postwar coup d’état, on 8 to 9 November 1947, the military justified their action by declaring, among other things, that they wanted to ‘eliminate communism in Thailand and ensure that the Buddhist religion will be eternally venerated’.Footnote 83 At that time, communist influence was well established within the Chinese community of Siam — ‘about one third of the Chinese colony, two hundred thousand people’Footnote 84 — as well as among Vietnamese refugees in northeast Siam, estimated at about forty thousand people. Phibun's postwar anti-communism was employed largely as an instrument to neutralise domestic political challenges, both from the royalists who had returned to the forefront through the success of the Free Thai Movement and from socialist-inclined fellow revolutionary, Pridi Banomyong. The anti-communist front was highly effective in gaining US trust and support during the years leading up to and throughout the Korean War.
In the late 1940s Thailand stopped supporting the Viet Minh and pledged to cooperate with Britain along the Thai–Malayan border in the name of the fight against communism. Towards the end of 1948, Phibun repeated ‘forcefully’ to his French interlocutors that he would not let ‘the Viet Minh claim the status of political refugees’ and said that he would ‘not differentiate between the paramilitary activities of the Viet Minh and those of [Lao Issara] and [Khmer Issarak]’.Footnote 85 Earlier, in July 1948, Phibun announced, following mass communist arrests in Malaya, that ‘the Ministry of Defence [was] asked to take measures to prevent any infiltration through the southern border of subversive elements who [would have sought] to take refuge in Siam to escape repression’. Police forces in the southern provinces had been strengthened and the border would now be ‘closely watched’.Footnote 86 Siam did not stop taking anti-communist measures afterwards until the promulgation of a new anti-communist law in 1952. The Thai government's position vis-à-vis its anti-communist allies would change significantly once Phibun decided to reach out to the predecessors of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Asia-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, and later attempted to establish underground diplomacy with China in the hope of balancing the rising power of the royalists who were gaining US support after the Korean War. This would allow the royalists to hijack the anti-communist narrative and overthrow Phibun in the coup of 1957, eventually replacing him with his own chief lieutenant and pro-American/anti-communist hardliner, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat.Footnote 87
Conclusion
The suppression of communist movements in Siam from the early decades of the twentieth century, through the reigns of Vajiravudh and Prajadhipok, the post-1932 revolutionary regime, and up to the actual Cold War period, had always had an element of reinforcing the elite's domestic position. While the pre-1932 royalist regimes persecuted communists for their anti-monarchist tendencies, the revolutionary government turned against communist movements because they were against the regime's most powerful ally — the Empire of Japan. The most significant difference between the anti-communist efforts of the pre-1932 and postwar royalist regimes and of the revolutionary government between 1932 and 1945, was their divergent attitudes towards the Western colonial powers and the emergence of modern nation-states in Southeast Asia. The royalist regimes, on the one hand, benefited from the support and endorsement of Western imperial powers — Britain and France and later the United States — and felt threatened by populist nationalist movements both in Siam and neighbouring states. The post-1932 regime, on the other hand, was anti-colonial and supported nationalist movements in neighbouring colonies in so far as they appeared to be in alliance with Japanese militarism, while Thailand's anti-communist efforts during the Second World War came to be synonymous with the suppression of Chinese nationalist movements against Japan and the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, of which Thailand was a proud member.
Although Pasquier's project of regional cooperation against communism was not successful, especially because of Japan's expansionism in the 1930s and early 1940s, it still seems to herald the establishment, but in a completely different context, of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954. This military alliance under the auspices of the United States and with the participation of, among others, the old colonial powers, England and France, and headquartered in Bangkok, was intended to fight against communism. Thus the international anti-communist projects and the Franco-Siamese Agreement at the beginning of Prajadhipok's reign appear as precursors of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, which were closely related to the maintenance of the colonial order, well before the expansion of Japan in the 1930s and of the United States in the 1940s. At the same time, it would also appear that Thai leaders from the era of the absolute monarchy up to the conclusion of the Cold War have consistently managed to manipulate foreign superpowers to support their political agenda and suppress domestic challengers. Despite Japan's defeat in the Second World War, Phibun was able to manipulate his wartime pro-Japanese communist suppression policies to gain support from anti-communist US for nearly the entire first decade of the Cold War. On the other hand, beginning with the regimes which replaced Phibun's, under Sarit and Thanom, the royalists managed to maintain a stranglehold on Thai politics throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, despite US defeat in the Vietnam War and the end of the Maoist era in Communist China.
The origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, both in the sense of anti-communist policies and manipulation of imperialist powers for the sake of domestic political dominance and nation-building, had been present in Thai elite politics from the earliest decades of the twentieth century and continued to be evident through to the conclusion of the Cold War. This confirms the argument that the Cold War in Southeast Asia, when defined as part of the process of decolonisation and nation-building through domestic power struggles and involving the manipulation of superpowers, originated with the rise of nationalist movements during the interwar years.
