BAN RAK THAI, Thailand — The scene does not look at first like a 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 Party regime in Beijing.
The KMT and China stopped killing each other decades ago. Today, KMT descendants graciously welcome China’s fun-seeking tourists by 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, and 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.
The tourist trade also tells a larger story. The traumatic reversals in fortune on both sides display how China’s monetized soft power increasingly influences 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 Bangkok has felt China’s growing economic pull and security muscle. A look around shows how China’s cultural and economic soft power appears in 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 education to learn Mandarin to prepare for possible careers dealing with Chinese investors, officials and others.
Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes have been controversial in the United States. In Thailand, 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 residents to become teachers. Critics say they give a sanitized picture of China and suppress dissident viewpoints.
Confucius Institute classes for Thai officials have included Anti-Corruption Bureau Chinese, Immigration Bureau Chinese, Parliament Chinese and Advanced Chinese for Government Officials, said a report titled “Confucius Institute in the 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,” the report says.
The China-based high-technology telecommunications leader Huawei, which faces severe headwinds in the U.S. and many other Western markets, operates a 5G telecommunications network that is thriving in Thailand. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s administration warmly welcomed Huawei.
In Bangkok, meanwhile, a new generation of Chinese immigrants has been arriving overland from Yunnan, Sichuan and other landlocked provinces.
These “overland Chinese” or “overland Yunnanese” are ethnically different from those of previous centuries, when most Chinese came to what was known as Siam by the Sea from China’s southeastern coast.
The ancestors of many modern-day Thais left China because 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 in 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 food — 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 raising concern about whose side Thailand — a war-tested treaty ally — would take if a U.S.-Chinese war erupts 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.
Wooing the Thais
Soft power is set to take a more significant 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, the 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” of 93rd Division stragglers who retreated southwest across the border into Myanmar — then known as Burma — near Thailand’s border.
From makeshift KMT bases inside Myanmar, the rebels launched futile cross-border assaults into southern China’s Yunnan province from 1949 to 1961, aided by the CIA.
Today, that little-known Cold War sideshow attracts tourists from the People’s Republic of China.
“This radio is from the Americans,” said Mr. Wang, 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 northwestern Thailand’s chunk of the Golden Triangle before the Chinese regime pressed Myanmar officials to oust the KMT.
The rebels and their families fled to Ban Rak Thai, less than a mile from Myanmar, and other northern Thai mountain villages in the 1950s and early 1960s. Opium smuggling continued, and poppy growing spread in the steep mountains of northwestern Thailand’s chunk of the Golden Triangle.
Thai officials eventually instructed the estimated 200 KMT families to grow tea and other legal, cool-climate crops.
In exchange, Thailand allowed the KMT survivors to settle, initially to guard the region against suspected Communist Party of Thailand members and subversive minority ethnic tribes in 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 the mock-vintage stone architecture, a quaint replica of Yunnan’s traditional villages.
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