Rural politics and female leadership in Southeast Asia: conventional views

I use this case study to revisit two related kinds of literature. One is the literature on rural Thai politics. As Thailand has become democratized from the 1970s onwards, a growing number of scholars have turned their attention to the pattern of politics in the countryside, where some 90 per cent of the national population resides. Taken individually, the contributions of these scholars are beyond dispute. Cumulatively, however, their scholarship has (inadvertently) perpetuated a stereotyped, negative image of rural Thailand by highlighting the dominance of unscrupulous politicians, many of whom derive their wealth from illegal businesses. These leaders, variously called ‘men of influence’, ‘gangsters’, ‘godfathers’, or ‘mafias’, have come to power by using a combination of money, violence, coercion, and patronage. Rural voters, for their part, are depicted as uneducated, venal, and tradition-bound folk who support any candidate under duress or in return for tangible material inducements.Footnote ⁵ Social issues or ideologies are, by and large, irrelevant to the question of who assumes a leadership position and why.Footnote ⁶ The recent rule of Thaksin Shinawatra, who was regarded as buying the votes of poor and uneducated villagers with his money-dumping populist policies, has done much to reinforce this view.Footnote ⁷

Such portrayals contrast curiously to the situation in the mid-1970s, when several prominent (leftist) leaders, such as Boonsanong Punyodyana, leader of the Socialist Party, emerged in the countryside by addressing important social issues.Footnote ⁸ However, once these social movements from below died down or were violently suppressed by the state in subsequent years,Footnote ⁹ rural Thailand has been transformed by the next generation of scholars into a problem-ridden entity, where politically unsophisticated people are perennially at the mercy of – guns, goons, and gold. It is only in recent years that a few critical or revisionist studies have appeared to call this picture into question.Footnote ¹⁰

The case of Ladawan adds to this new body of research on rural Thai politics. The fact that she has emerged as a politician by overcoming gender handicaps in male-dominant rural Thai society bears testimony to her successful issue-oriented public campaigns against prostitution. The nature of social issues for which politicians stand up, as well as the effectiveness and consistency with which they pursue those issues, matter a good deal in rural Thailand, as they also do elsewhere.

This paper seeks to contribute to another kind of literature—the nascent literature on the role and character of female political leadership in the democratizing countries of Southeast Asia. Although Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand have made a transition to democracy in the last three decades or so, politics remains the ‘turf’ of men. In 2009, female politicians made up only 18.2 per cent, 20.5 per cent, and 13 per cent of the Lower House members in these three countries, respectively.Footnote ¹¹ While some scholars deplore this gender imbalance and analyse the factors that inhibit women's full political participation,Footnote ¹² I agree with James Ockey that a more interesting and fruitful line of inquiry would be to explore how the small number of women has become politicians.Footnote ¹³ Few scholars have examined this question however, and the scant attention given has been directed at a handful of globally prominent and urban-based national-level politicians, such as Corazon Aquino.Footnote ¹⁴ As a result, precious little is known about who other female politicians are, how they have come to power, and what kind of impact they have had on the process or quality of democratization. This is especially the case with rural-based female politicians such as Ladawan, who come from non-elite backgrounds. The fact that such women remain a numerical minority does not justify academic neglect.

Another deficiency in the literature is that it tends to explain the types of female leadership in quite limited or pessimistic terms. It identifies four factors as crucial to the rise of female politicians. The first factor is an elite family background, which gives female members a host of politically useful resources—for example, money, connections, and fame.Footnote ¹⁵ A prime example is Corazon Aquino, who was born into the powerful landowning Cojuangco clan in Tarlac Province and married into another powerful landowning family from the same province. No matter how she tried to project herself as a woman of humble origin, the fact is she belonged to the upper class that had historically dominated Filipino politics.Footnote ¹⁶ Imee Marcos, the daughter of the late President Ferdinand Marcos and a congresswoman from Ilocos Norte (1998–2007), is another case in point. A similar example in Thailand is Supatra Masdit, an MP from the southern province of Nakhon Sithammarat. She is from a politician's family—her father was once a prominent MP from the same province. She simply took over his role after his retirement. She owed her first election to Parliament in 1979 to ‘the respect that people had for her father’. In other words, she did not win entirely on her own merit.Footnote ¹⁷

Mina Roces entertains the possibility that women from non-elite families may be able to attain political posts, but only through marriage or an ‘alliance with powerful and wealthy families’. Marrying into such families and receiving support from their husbands is a ‘typical pattern’ for women who become politicians in the Philippines.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, Linda Richter concludes: ‘There are very few female political leaders without links to politically prominent male relatives’.Footnote ¹⁹ The rise of female leadership, then, represents merely a continuation of the elite rule that had long characterized the politics of Southeast Asia. Put crudely, only women from rich and well-connected families can become politicians.

A second factor that explains the rise of female politicians is martyrdom. These women had fathers or husbands who were assassinated, imprisoned or tragically deposed from power. The legacies of these male kin members enable women to win public sympathy, to stand on high moral grounds, and to galvanize civilian opposition against repressive authoritarian rule. Corazon Aquino and Megawati Sukarnoputri are obvious examples.Footnote ²⁰ Put in cynical terms, however, a familial tragedy must befall women first, before they can become eligible for leadership. This body of literature thus depicts female leaders as subordinate to, or dependent on, male kin members. They did not have any notable political agenda of their own; they simply carried on with what their husbands or fathers had wanted to do. They are passive political actors in that sense.

Third is physical beauty or sex appeal. In the Philippines, many prominent female politicians, including Imelda Marcos, are former beauty queens. Because of their beauty, they were noticed and courted by male politicians. Having established kinship ties to prominent political clans through marriage, the former beauty queens then embarked on their own political careers. In countries such as the Philippines and Thailand, where women are often regarded as ‘commodified products’ (as exemplified by the large sex industry and the enormous popularity of beauty contests),Footnote ²¹ physical beauty, or a willingness to project it in public, is an important ‘source of power’ for politically disadvantaged women.Footnote ²² The female politicians who fit this type, no matter how successful they may be, only reinforce the already strong gender stereotypes.

Fourth is the adoption of quintessentially ‘male’ characters. To the extent that women are perceived as too weak and unfit for the ‘rough’ world of politics, successful female politicians have readjusted, deemphasized, or neutralized their ‘womanlike’ personalities to enter and survive in this world. These women have thus contributed to the masculinization of politics. Typical examples are Thailand's ‘godmothers’ (jaomae), who have attained enormous wealth and power by appropriating the abrasive, ruthless, violent, and fearless characteristics of male gangsters or godfathers (jaopho). This is how women from ordinary backgrounds, which many godmothers are, have been able to achieve upward social mobility in male-dominant Thai society. It is no surprise, then, that female politicians with interests in gambling, prostitution and other illicit businesses have increased in number, and that violence perpetrated by those female criminals has become common occurrences.Footnote ²³ This analysis reinforces the conventional grisly image of rural Thai politics.

According to the literature surveyed above, the circumstances or causes of women's entry into politics are such that they have failed to have much positive impact on the quality or substance (as opposed to the form) of democratization. Once they were in power, these leaders were constrained by their familial or personal interests from undertaking the much-needed political, economic, and social reforms that they had promised. Thus Aquino failed dismally in carrying out land reforms.Footnote ²⁴ Instead of pursuing reformasi, Megawati formed a ‘party cartel’ to monopolize spoils of office.Footnote ²⁵ In short, these women have turned out to be little different from their male predecessors. Thompson was thus led to conclude that the female leaders played an important role in achieving democratic transition from dictatorship, but not in the process of democratic consolidation.Footnote ²⁶ They have not played a role that male politicians have not played. Gender has not made much difference in enhancing the quality of democracy, at least in Southeast Asia.

Ladawan, a gentle-mannered daughter from a non-elite ethnic minority family in Phayao, defies these less-than-positive descriptions. What brought her to power is not any of the factors enumerated above but her moral stance against prostitution—the most serious social issue that had afflicted Phayao's village society for several decades. Once in office, she continued to pursue her agenda aggressively. In an important sense, she fits one type of ‘good’ politicians for many voters in rural Thailand. As Anek Laothamatas and Andrew Walker have shown, rural voters, whose socioeconomic interests have long been neglected by the central state, have come to possess different interests, values, and expectations from those of urban-based voters.Footnote ²⁷ While the latter support politicians who champion the lofty yet abstract ‘national interests’ of Thailand, rural voters define politicians’ value in much more concrete terms: They prefer politicians who ‘address their immediate grievances effectively’ (among other things).Footnote ²⁸ Thus, these scholars note that rural-based politicians do not always buy their way into the corridors of power, as is often believed; those who address and resolve specific social issues at the local level get elected, simply because they have the voters’ support.

The importance of social issues to the success of female leadership is inadequately emphasized in the literature, however. Roces does discuss the case of Miriam Defensor Santiago, a Filipino congresswoman, whose moral crusade against corruption and prostitution were crucial to her rise to power. Her social activism, however, was not enough to clinch her success. She also had to publicize her cause by wearing a bathing suit and by showing her legs for the camera. Only by playing this physical ‘trump card’ was she able to attract much attention and support. At the same time, she cultivated a ‘tough image’ by adopting the abusive language of male politicians in her campaign—for example, ‘Shut up or I'll knock your teeth off!’. That is how she overcame the prevailing stereotyped image of female candidates as weak and unfit for ‘dirty’ politics.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, Roce's discussion of Santiago, while recognizing the importance of social issues, reinforces the afore-mentioned point that physical beauty and (dissimulated) masculinity are of key importance to the success of female politicians.

Likewise, in his valuable study of female leadership in Thailand, Ockey spotlights a few women—Chodchoy Sophonpanich, Pratheep Ungsongtham, and Arunee Sito—who have taken up worthy social issues.Footnote ³⁰ But one of these women, Chodchoy, is from Thailand's super-elite family: She is the daughter of Chin Sophonpanich, whose Bangkok Bank Group constitutes one of the largest conglomerates in Thailand. Thus, Chodchoy's case underscores the importance of elite family ties. In addition, although Ockey categorizes Chodchoy as a ‘social activist’ and ‘environmentalist’, his analysis is so general that the reader does not get a clear sense of the specific social issue(s) she has taken up. Moreover, Chodchoy, Pratheep, and Arunee are all based in Bangkok. Ockey unfortunately does not discuss the case or possibility of any like-minded female leader emerging in rural Thailand. The case of Ladawan makes up for this weakness.

What follows is an empirical elaboration of the points sketched above. I detail the historical circumstances in which Ladawan attained a position of political leadership in Phayao, how she did that, and with what effect.

Prostitution in Phayao: historical background

Prostitution has a long recorded history in Thailand. It dates back as far as the 1680s, when the ruling court of the Ayutthaya Kingdom started the ‘tradition of drawing significant state revenue from prostitution’.Footnote ³¹ In Phayao, however, it was not until the late 1960s that prostitution emerged as a major ‘profession’. An important catalyst for this change was the rise of the ‘developmental authoritarian state’, which undertook massive export-oriented industrialization under the military leadership of Sarit Thanarat (Prime Minister, 1957–1963) and his successor, Thanom Kittikachon (1963–1973).

The problem with this industrialization was that it was concentrated in Bangkok and its vicinity without benefiting far-off agrarian provinces, such as Phayao. The new economic strategy squeezed surplus from the vast rural agricultural sector into urban industries. An example of this surplus extraction was ‘rice premium’, a unique and oppressive form of taxation imposed in 1955, which effectively depressed the rural income by taking away 25–35 per cent of the value of rice exports. Consequently, the already skewed distribution of wealth between Bangkok and the countryside became all the more skewed. Exacerbating the situation was the rapid population growth, the attendant evaporation of land frontiers, and the introduction of new agricultural technology, which all increased the number of land-poor or landless farmers.Footnote ³²

The ‘developmental’ state did little to address these mounting problems. Although it initiated massive road construction in rural areas, the primary purpose of this infrastructure development was to extend the reach of the state to contain growing communist insurgency.Footnote ³³ If anything, the roads facilitated the more systematic surplus extraction by incorporating formerly isolated, self-subsistent villages into the national and global capitalist economy. Thus, while Thailand achieved rapid economic growth at the aggregate national level, more and more rural dwellers sank into poverty.

Located on the geographical margin of Thailand, Phayao was adversely affected by this pattern of uneven economic development. At the time of becoming a province in 1977, Phayao had a per capita gross provincial product (GPP) of 3,121 baht—the seventh lowest figure amongst the then 72 provinces in Thailand. All other provinces in the north had a higher GPP. Moreover, agriculture accounted for nearly 64 per cent of Phayao's GPP in 1977. No other province in Thailand was more heavily dependent on agriculture.Footnote ³⁴ The economic structure was such that very few employment opportunities were available outside agriculture. Phayao was at or near the bottom of the economic heap in Thailand.

Meanwhile, the sex industry emerged and thrived in Bangkok in response to several interrelated developments: the rapid industrialization which produced a large middle class with disposable income; the influx of male migrant workers from the countryside; the Vietnam War which brought American soldiers to Thailand; and the arrival of foreign tourists and businessmen. A growing number of sex establishments sprang up to cater for the needs of these people. Most notable were massage parlours, which became the largest employers of girls from Phayao. First introduced to Thailand from Japan in 1951, massage parlours were legalized under the Entertainment Places Act of 1966.Footnote ³⁵ They caught on. The Anti-Prostitution Act of 1960, passed by Sarit to establish social order, existed only in name. The police reaped enormous profits from protecting and expanding the officially illegalized sex industry. By 1980, at least 120 massage parlours had appeared in Bangkok.Footnote ³⁶

This growing demand for sex workers pushed a huge number of young girls in Phayao to leave their poverty-stricken villages and to migrate to Bangkok to sell their bodies—an act euphemistically called ‘going south’ (long tai).Footnote ³⁷ Phayao-born girls, noted for their beauty, fair skin, gentle manners, and soft-spoken speech, became highly coveted in the flesh trade. One study conducted in 1992 showed that 35 per cent of the prostitutes in Bangkok were from Phayao and Chiang Rai, out of the more than 70 provinces in Thailand.Footnote ³⁸

Typically, the parents sold, or were forced to sell, their daughters out of economic necessity, especially after a bad harvest year. In some cases, girls as young as 11 or 12 were sold soon after they finished four years of compulsory education.Footnote ³⁹ Economic imperatives overrode the parents’ moral compunction about their actions. For their part, most girls justified their entry into the socially stigmatized profession as an act of filial piety (katanyu kataweti), an act intended to repay (torp thaen) their parents for having raised them and to look after their younger siblings.Footnote ⁴⁰ Behind this painful decision was a stark reality: The preponderant majority of village girls in Phayao had no more than six years of education.Footnote ⁴¹ The major source of employment for such girls was agriculture, where the already depressed income was highly susceptible to vagaries of the weather. But they could expect to get easily ten times more money and fulfil their filial obligations, only if they sold their bodies. Thus, they made a rationalized choice—a choice that they made appear rational by invoking their moral obligations as dutiful daughters. For both parents and daughters, the end justified the means.

In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the motives behind prostitution became more complex. At the basic level, a desire to escape poverty or to stay afloat economically continued to be the biggest ‘push’ factor. During this period, the price of rice, the most important source of income for Phayao's farmers, steadily decreased, as the major importers of Thai rice, notably Indonesia, achieved self-sufficiency in rice.Footnote ⁴² Also, the subsidy granted to American rice farmers under the Farm Act of 1986 further pushed the rice price down.Footnote ⁴³ Under these circumstances, prostitution remained a viable economic strategy for indigent families in Phayao. Insofar as this was the case, the situation in Phayao was little different from other spatiotemporal cases of prostitution.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Phayao (and other parts of northern Thailand), however, another important motive behind prostitution surfaced by the 1980s: a desire to acquire visible material symbols of ‘modernity’.

This change arose from the increasingly pronounced disparity in material comfort between the households that sold their daughters and those that did not. The former regularly received huge remittances—totalling 76 million baht in 1979 in Dok Kham Tai District aloneFootnote ⁴⁵ —from their daughters. The parents used the remittances, less to invest in long-term capital goods (for example, agricultural machinery) than to buy and flaunt consumer goods—television sets, refrigerators, irons, jewellery, motorcycles, cars, and ultimately houses. In one village after another, these formerly unthinkable luxurious material goods appeared in rapid succession, bringing with them formerly unthinkable styles of living.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, what Max Weber would call ‘visible social status stratification’ or ‘prestige hierarchy’, as opposed to purely economic class stratification in a Marxist sense,Footnote ⁴⁷ appeared within the more or less egalitarian agriculture-based village society.

It was an open secret that the ‘nouveaux riches’ owed their wealth to the sale of their daughters, but their conspicuous consumerist lifestyles became the objects of many villagers’ admiration, envy, or jealousy, generating powerful demonstration effects. The moral quality of daughters came to be judged on whether they could buy such lifestyles for their parents.Footnote ⁴⁸

The homecoming of ‘successful’ prostitutes (for instance, during the Thai New Year in mid-April) became the centre of envious attention, too. The girls who had left for Bangkok less than a year earlier with unkempt hair and wearing worn-out clothes and sandals now strutted back with new blouses, jeans, shoes, make-up, earrings, and a stylish haircut.Footnote ⁴⁹ These material possessions gave the girls self-esteem and enabled them to forge their new identity as ‘modern girls’ (phuying thansamai). The village-born girls in Phayao sought to become ‘modern’ through prostitution in the same way that their counterparts in the north-eastern region of Thailand did through factory work in Bangkok.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some villagers gossiped or made cynical comments in secret about these girls’ ‘artificial’ beauty,Footnote ⁵¹ but it was still envied in secret.

As villagers came to be impressed with how prostitution could change their lifestyles, their perceptions started to change. A profession that used to be disdained gradually appeared more attractive and even desirable.Footnote ⁵² Sex workers gained a measure of respect. The social stigma attached to prostitution began to diminish, if not disappear. As a clear indication of this change, prostitutes could find marriage partners. Formerly, they had little hope of marrying; very few men wanted to marry them. But now men came to prefer (former) prostitutes because they were richer, more beautiful, better dressed, and more ‘skilful in bed’.Footnote ⁵³ In Village A, as one middle-aged son from a rice-cultivating family recollects, every time one of the district's former beauty queens returned home from Bangkok, where she worked at a high-class massage parlour in the late 1980s, several unattached men, both young and old, ‘scrambled’ (yaeng) to court her. (Their courtships all failed, however, when she became a mistress for a Sino-Thai businessman in Bangkok.)

As former prostitutes set ‘good’ examples to follow, more and more families sold their daughters without much moral inhibition in their eagerness to climb up the status hierarchy measured in terms of material possessions. Even relatively well-to-do families did so.Footnote ⁵⁴ They found it humiliating that poorer households that used to ask for assistance from them were now getting richer.Footnote ⁵⁵ In one village of Dok Kham Tai District, which a well-known Thai-language study dubbed a ‘prostitution community’ (chumnum kankha praweni), virtually all households that had daughters ended up selling them.Footnote ⁵⁶ One resident in Village A recalled:

Stoked by a deluge of flashy commercial advertisements on television and in magazines and newspapers, this endless spiral of materialism, which Ladawan calls ‘bottomless consumerism’ (kan boriphok thi mai ruujak pho),Footnote ⁵⁷ dulled many villagers’ sense of morality. One woman, aged 45 (in 2007) and one of the few girls not sold in Village A, recalls that her father, a primary school teacher, was called ‘stupid’ by his fellow villagers for refusing to sell her on strictly moral grounds. Similarly, a middle-aged female civil servant from Village D recounted what is an extremely common story:

Such households took extremely good care of their daughters. The daughters, for example, were allowed to do only minimal farming because continual exposure to sunlight would damage their fair skin. This kind of special treatment was regarded as a necessary investment in future wealth. Although we cannot jump to crude generalizations—there are some conspicuous exceptions (to be discussed later)—it is nonetheless true that many cases conformed to the pattern described here.

Girls, for their part, often ‘volunteered’ (samakjai) their services to help their parents ‘keep up with the Joneses’. An elderly farmer in Village A explains how her niece from a rice-growing family, NN (a pseudonym), entered the business:

NN could not refute this ‘logic’ couched in the powerful language of filial piety. She entered a massage parlour in Bangkok in 1988 at age 18. Five years later, she built a brand-new house for her parents. She did not want her parents to be ‘ashamed’ (aai) or ‘inferior’ (noi naa) to their neighbours. In Villages A–D (and others), modern big houses built by girls such as NN kept popping up year after year. One street in Dok Kham Tai District is nicknamed ‘Millionaires’ Street’ for having many such houses.Footnote ⁵⁹ Not all girls, to be sure, were as successful and fortunate as NN, but the point is that they all left with the same motive. This kind of situation may be hard for uninitiated outsiders to fathom, but it was part of the ‘culture’ in rural Phayao. The village girls faced enormous pressure, whether overt or unspoken, to conform to the social norms or expectations that had developed over the decades. Deviating from these norms would have incurred the label of ‘ungrateful’ daughters, and as Cook aptly says, the fear of ‘the stigma of. . .ingratitude to parents’ was greater than ‘the stigma of prostitution’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Contrary to the picture depicted by many social activists and feminist groups,Footnote ⁶¹ this is not entirely a story of social injustice perpetrated against poor, helpless girls and their families in rural Thailand. They were not innocent victims coerced or tricked into the exploitative flesh trade. Many (if certainly not all) girls and their parents were voluntary and even active participants in, and grateful beneficiaries of, the expanding sex industry.

Some Buddhist monks—the spiritual leaders in predominantly Buddhist Phayao—were complicit, if unwittingly, in this change. Sex workers and their families would make copious donations to temples in their respective communities to compensate for their demerit of being involved in prostitution. Many monks used these donations to renovate their dilapidated temple buildings in a splendid fashion. According to one study conducted in 1996, 20 of the 41 high-ranking monks in Phayao admitted to having received donations from the girls engaged in prostitution.Footnote ⁶² The monks initially felt ‘strange’ about receiving donations from prostitutes.Footnote ⁶³ But, as donations mounted over the years, they came to ‘praise’ the girls, at least in public, as unselfish and dutiful daughters, in effect condoning and legitimating the girls’ otherwise morally condemnable acts. The names of those numerous ‘dutiful’ girls are written—and immortalized—on the walls of the renovated temples in various villages I visited in Phayao. The girls were thus able to defend and even value themselves as ‘good pious Buddhists’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The monks were of course against prostitution in principle and in secret,Footnote ⁶⁵ but many of them were constrained by the institutional need to maintain their temples in good condition.

Over the years, the process of recruiting girls became more systematic with the advent of ‘professional’ agents. To survive in the increasingly competitive industry, sex establishments needed to recruit ‘the cream of the crop’. This produced a ‘mad scramble’ for pretty girls in Phayao. Consequently, a system of girl-hunting, called tok-khiew (green harvest), was introduced and took deep root. Originally, the expression meant the act of farmers selling their green paddy in return for money.Footnote ⁶⁶ Applied to the flesh trade, the expression referred to the practice of agents buying underage girls or booking them in advance for later purchase. Such girls were compared with agricultural products which, although still unripe, would turn ‘delicious’ if they were allowed to mature. As these girls approached graduation from primary school, agents would visit their homes to offer a deal. In the case of very pretty girls, for whom competition was fierce, various agents would offer an advance contract a few years before graduation. The highest bidder would win. The agents consisted mostly of current or former prostitutes who recruited new girls by recounting enticing stories of their ‘success’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thanks to this tok-khiew system based on village-level social networks, young girls were ‘rounded up’ each year, recalls one man in Village A, ‘as if they were small fish in a big net cast over our entire village’. As one partial measure of the effectiveness of the system, among the 5,620 girls aged 16 in Phayao in 1980, only 1,002 (or 17.8 per cent) were attending school.Footnote ⁶⁸

The construction of a 75-kilometer asphalt provincial highway—Highway 1021 (see Figure 1)—further accelerated the migration of girls from Phayao. Formerly made of gravel and dirt, this road was called ‘one of the worst roads in Thailand’ by one researcher who lived in Phayao between 1959 and 1961. ‘Even during the dry season, it would take eight hours to reach the nearest paved road’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In September 1972, the Highways Department initiated the project of paving this road with asphalt by channelling more than 101 million baht. Completed in July 1978, the new road connected various parts of Phayao to the National Highway No. 1, which extends all the way to Bangkok.Footnote ⁷⁰ The road facilitated the unprecedented mobility of girls from Phayao. It is no coincidence that the districts through which this road runs—Dok Kham Tai, Chiang Kham, and Jun—have produced the largest number of prostitutes in Phayao. As one indication of the massive migration of prostitutes, a 55-year-old petty merchant living near the provincial bus terminal recalls that the long-distance buses between Bangkok and Phayao were usually packed with young girls, and the companies that operated those buses reaped enormous profits. During the Thai New Year in April, when most sex workers in Bangkok returned home, these companies more than doubled the number of bus services.Footnote ⁷¹

If the state of Phayao's agrarian economy, the allure of materialist culture, and the construction of a road network ‘pushed’ more and more girls into the sex industry, the Bangkok-based economic boom from the late 1980s onwards became the biggest ‘pull’ factor. The affluent middle-class men flocked to a range of glitzy sex establishments—not only massage parlous, but also karaoke bars, high-class cocktail lounges, and others—which popped up in the capital city. Such behaviour was the status symbols of their increasing wealth.Footnote ⁷² After the Thai government's successful promotion of ‘Visit Thailand Year’ in 1987, foreign tourists, too, poured in each day in search of ‘exotic’ Thai girls.Footnote ⁷³ To cash in on such abundant opportunities for wealth, one girl after another in Phayao became a sex worker. Young girls simply disappeared from villages. As a man in Dok Kham Tai recalled to one anthropologist, ‘only the ugly ones [were] left behind’.Footnote ⁷⁴ After making the same statement to me, one motorcyclist in Mae Jai District added half-jokingly: ‘Actually, even ugly ones went [south]!’ The United Nations International Decade for Women (1976–1985), widely hailed by feminists as a big step forward for oppressed women, proved to be completely hallow, leaving no positive impact at the ground level in Phayao. The massive and eager entry of many Phayao girls into prostitution flew in the face of what vociferous feminists were standing up for on the world stage.

As the number of Phayao-born prostitutes proliferated, their destinations widened to include other Thai cities, notably Hadyai and Sungai Kolok in southern Thailand across the border from Malaysia. Since the early 1980s, the destinations extended to foreign countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and, most importantly, Japan—the ultimate ‘dream’ country for Phayao girls. The Plaza Accord of 1985, which sharply appreciated the value of yen (from US$1 = 240 yen in 1985, to US$1 = 79 yen in 1995), and the subsequent economic boom in Japan, accelerated this transnational movement. The devaluation of baht, enforced in 1981 and 1984 to redress Thailand's worsening balance of payments, made Japan all the more attractive as a destination. A popular Thai movie made in 1989, Twilight in Tokyo (Thai title: Kon kam haeng khwam rak), also conveyed a powerful message that millions of baht could be earned in the Japanese sex industry in just a few years.Footnote ⁷⁵ About one-third of the sex workers from Villages A and B headed for Japan in the 1980s-1990s with fake passports (which were quite easy to make) and without visas. Two sisters I interviewed in Village A worked in Shinjuku of Tokyo and Ibaragi Prefecture (located northeast of Tokyo), respectively, for two years in the early 1990s. Their ‘successes’ enticed their two friends to go to Japan in subsequent years, too. According to one account, an estimated 17,000 Thai prostitutes worked illegally in Japan between 1991 and 1994.Footnote ⁷⁶ Many of them were from Phayao. One Japanese who served as a Thai interpreter in court recalls that, as early as 1982, the Thai sex workers arrested in Japan included a good number of girls from Phayao.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similarly, according to the Thai Embassy in Tokyo, of the Thai prostitutes who worked in Japan between November 1993 and February 1996, almost 28 per cent were from Phayao alone, and Dok Kham Tai, Muang, Jun, and Chiang Kham Districts accounted for 35.4 per cent, 26 per cent, 18.8 per cent, and 14.8 per cent of those girls, respectively.Footnote ⁷⁸ These Japan-bound girls earned far more money than Bangkok-based workers. The money enabled their families in Phayao to build spacious concrete houses equipped with modern facilities. These houses, simply called ‘Japanese Houses’, became alluring symbols of what prostitution in Japan could do.Footnote ⁷⁹ Villages A and B are studded with such houses, confounding the stereotyped images of ‘poor’ Thai villages.

Phayao thus established itself as a major supplier of prostitutes in Thailand. By the 1990s, at the mention of Phayao, ‘prostitution’ would ‘invariably’ come to mind.Footnote ⁸⁰ Within Phayao, Dok Kham Tai became particularly famous as ‘the mill producing prostitutes’.Footnote ⁸¹ In 1972 even a movie, entitled Monrak Dok Kham Tai (Love Spell of Dok Kham Tai), was made about the sad life of a young prostitute from this district. A song with the same title and motif also became a hit, further diffusing Dok Kham Tai's (and Phayao's) reputation throughout the country.Footnote ⁸² Given the attendant popularity of girls from Dok Kham Tai, even those from outside the district sold themselves on the market as ‘born in Dok Kham Tai’—a story that many of my respondents in Village A proudly recalled.

In sum, the massive entry of Phayao girls into the sex industry resulted from a confluence of interrelated forces at the local, national, and international levels. These forces pushed and pulled a generation of girls in Phayao to migrate to Bangkok and elsewhere to sell their bodies—the most marketable commodities they possessed. Viewed from a broad—and rather polemical—historical perspective, one might say that prostitution contributed substantially to institutionalizing the Thai capitalist state in the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) was quite active in the countryside, having infiltrated nearly half the provinces of Thailand, including Chiang Rai (of which Phayao was a part).Footnote ⁸³ This took place against the backdrop of the escalating Vietnam War and the eventual US military withdrawal from the region. Moreover, university students in Bangkok, inspired by Marxist writings, mounted increasingly vociferous attacks on Japanese economic imperialism, as manifested by their public campaign for boycotting Japanese products. The communist threat was palpably on the rise, leading the conservative political and economic elite (most notably King Bhumibol, the nation's foremost ‘capitalist’ with stakes in joint ventures with JapanFootnote ⁸⁴) to organize ultra-rightist movements such as the Village Scouts.Footnote ⁸⁵ While most scholars view the state-sponsored violence as defusing the leftist threats, prostitution arguably performed the same function in Phayao by integrating more and more peasants—the CPT's main targets—firmly into the Bangkok-based national and transnational capitalism. What was ironic about this is that capitalism was responsible for reproducing Phayao's economic marginality—the root cause of prostitution—in the first place. But given their limited opportunities, peasant families in Phayao had to rely on that system for income. The capitalist economy, in short, was at once the cause of, and solution to, Phayao's poverty.

The scourge of AIDS

The villagers’ ‘bumper years’ did not last long. In the early 1990s, they started suffering profoundly serious consequences of their actions: the high incidence of HIV/AIDS. The official data give glimpses of the veritable pandemonium caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1990, Phayao had only five reported cases of HIV infection. By 1994, however, the number had skyrocketed by 15,540 per cent to 782 cases. Over the next year, the number doubled to 1,598, before peaking at 1,819 in 1997 (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Number of HIV Infections in Phayao, 1989–2006.

Source: Data obtained at the Ministry of Public Health on 25 January 2007.

Infection routes were varied. A common route was through former prostitutes who returned to Phayao. Not knowing they had been infected, many of them married local men. Another route was through local brothels (congregated behind the central bus terminal in Phayao), where relatively old ‘washed-up’ prostitutes offered sex for as little as 20–30 baht (about US$1). With cash gained from their daughters’ or sisters’ remittances, male farmers and workers patronized these brothels, contracted HIV (for not using condoms which were more expensive than buying sex; they also had a lax attitude towards unprotected sex), and transmitted it to their wives or girlfriends. Many of these people had babies, further spreading the virus. In 1993, an alarming 10 per cent of pregnant women in Phayao were HIV positive. HIV thus spread to the general public. Between 1994 and 1997, Phayao had by far the highest HIV-infection rate amongst the 76 provinces in Thailand.Footnote ⁸⁶ It was only in the late 1990s that the rate dropped, thanks to extensive campaigns by the government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) regarding the use of condoms.

Deaths from AIDS also jumped precipitously in the early 1990s, reaching a peak in 1995. A ‘lull’ in the next few years was followed by another big wave (Figure 3). By 1994, AIDS became the leading cause of death in Phayao. The main victims were the young. In the decade 1986–1996, the death rate among people aged between 20 and 34 increased by 700–800 per cent. Infant mortality also tripled between 1991 and 1992. Accordingly, the rate of population growth declined to almost nil in 1997, and the proportion of the aged increased.Footnote ⁸⁷ The rapid spread of AIDS pushed up the death rate (per 1,000 people) in Phayao from 5.39 in 1990 to 11.17 in 1996, turning Phayao into a province with the highest death rate in Thailand.Footnote ⁸⁸ The official statistics above are quite conservative, as they are based on reported cases only; the actual figures are probably several times higher. The data does indicate, however, that AIDS took a horrifyingly heavy toll on Phayao's small population.

Figure 3.

Number of Deaths from AIDS in Phayao, 1989–2006.

Source: Data obtained at the Ministry of Public Health on 25 January 2007.

Hidden in the aggregate data are devastating social, economic, and psychological effects on the ground. Socially, infected people were discriminated against or ostracized in their villages, even by their own family members. If AIDS patients had a meal at a food stall, for example, the stall owner would throw their spoons and forks into a dustbin before their eyes to send a silent yet unmistakably clear and cruel message: ‘Don't come here again’. The girls who had been ‘praised’ as dutiful daughters were now despised and condemned for bringing an evil epidemic to their villages. It is only in the last several years that due to the enhanced knowledge of HIV/AIDS, infected people and AIDS patients have come to receive emotional support from their fellow villagers and the wider community.

Psychological effects have been just as severe. A case in point—a quite pitiful case—concerns a 9-year-old girl in Village C. She has been orphaned by her farming parents, both of whom died of AIDS shortly after she was born. Her mother had worked as a prostitute in Bangkok. Like many other orphans, she is too young to remember either parent. What is even sadder is that she was born with HIV. When I accompanied her schoolteacher and two fellow villagers—all women—during their regular visit to her small, dimly lit wooden house (which indicated that her mother did not meet with much success in Bangkok), the girl looked dejected and frail without any smile and any word. She is old enough to know what AIDS means and what fate awaits her. Since her parents’ death, her skinny grandmother, a farmer aged over 60, has looked after her. Most tragically, the grandmother herself is also HIV positive. She contracted it from her husband who died five years earlier ‘AIDS has destroyed our whole family’, she said with tears welling up in her eyes. The plight of the family was appalling indeed. The family, however, is hardly atypical. ‘You must be shocked’, the schoolteacher told me as we left the house, ‘but there are some more families like this around here’.

Uninfected villagers, too, felt much psychological pain—the pain of seeing AIDS taking the lives of their family members, friends, neighbours, and relatives. ‘I have seen young men and women die [of AIDS] like leaves falling from trees’, an 85-year-old female farmer in Phayao sadly lamented in 1996.Footnote ⁸⁹ With much of the reproductive population gone, the number of students at some primary schools has decreased by half over the last decade. A female civil servant (born 1962) in Village A gave another grim account:

This civil servant had lost half her primary school classmates to AIDS by the year 2000. And her four neighbouring households have all lost at least one family member to the epidemic in the decade since. ‘Frightening’ is probably an understatement to describe how she felt.

The epidemic has also dealt a terrible economic blow. Over the short term, the various costs related to looking after infected people—e.g., medicine, transportation to hospitals—have made heavy demands on the caretakers’ income and savings. These costs are all the more onerous if more than one family member is infected, which is hardly uncommon. Opportunity costs that arise from looking after AIDS patients are also considerable. Funeral expenses are another big burden. To meet all these expenses, many villagers have been forced to sell the very material goods that they had acquired from their daughters’ remittances. AIDS has brought them back to square one.

More crippling are the long-term costs of losing economically productive young adults. Aging parents must worry about how to support themselves and surviving family members.Footnote ⁹¹ An example is a 60-year-old widow in Village D, a farmer whose average monthly income is 900 baht. Her daughter, a former sex worker in Hadyai, married a local man and gave birth to a son. She and her husband, however, had both contracted HIV and died a few years after their son was born. Luckily, the son was not infected, and he is now in the custody of the 60-year-old grandmother. But as she said bleakly, ‘I can barely support him. And I can't live forever. I just hope I will live long enough to see this boy finish school and get some kind of job. If I die before that, who will look after him?’ She and many other ageing parents gained short-term economic stability and material comfort at the expense of their long-term economic well-being.

Thus, to countless people in Phayao, the ravage of HIV/AIDS is not something they read about in newspapers or hear about on television. The plague directly hit their families, friends, relatives, classmates, and neighbours. So many people were forced to confront head-on this raging deadly epidemic, which posed a real menace, not just to the survival of their individual households but to the survival of their village communities as a whole. Plainly, the epidemic turned their lives upside down.

Accordingly, many villagers in Phayao have been compelled to engage in a sober soul-searching reappraisal of their past actions. They have learned a lesson the hard way about the fatal pitfall of relying myopically on prostitution for income and material comfort. Even before King Bhumibol announced his famous and didactic ‘self-sufficient economy’ concept—a concept that attacked unbridled greed as the cause of the financial crisis of 1997 and called for restoration of ‘good old’ local communities based on traditional Buddhist valuesFootnote ⁹²— the encroaching AIDS peril had forced many farmers in Phayao to reflect on their materialistic attitudes and behaviour. The farmers have been joined by middle- and upper-class people. AIDS has taken the lives of many young people who belong to these classes, too.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, the people from these classes are concerned about the profoundly negative nationwide image or reputation of Phayao as ‘the birthplace of prostitutes’.

The rage of HIV/AIDS has thus made the bulk of Phayao's population painfully realise that prostitution is a socially and economically destructive profession in the long run. There is a growing consensus on the need to prevent young girls from entering the flesh trade. This has become the most important social issue that transcends the otherwise divisive differences of social class, gender, and age in Phayao. There has been a dramatic seismic shift in the moral universe of Phayao's village societies.

This shift has accelerated, and has been accelerated by, the rise of civil society in Phayao. A large number of domestic and international NGOs, medical doctors, foreign government institutions (especially the Japan International Cooperation Agency—JICA), and Thai government officials from the Ministries of Public Health and Education have penetrated deep into Phayao. These people and organizations that possess expert scientific knowledge of HIV/AIDS collectively make up what might be called the sub-national ‘epistemic community’, which has done a lot to educate the public on the epidemic and to eliminate bias against its victims. In addition, a large number of philanthropic individuals, both Thai and foreign, have sacrificed their time and money to set up various schemes aimed at stamping out prostitution and helping out children from disadvantaged families.Footnote ⁹⁴ At the same time, many villages have also taken the initiative from the bottom up to organize their own grassroots self-help activities, whereby HIV-infected people and AIDS patients meet regularly to exchange information, provide moral support to each other, and have fun together by singing and performing plays.Footnote ⁹⁵

One important element of this emerging civil society is the rise of Ladawan as a prominent anti-prostitution female leader. In fact, she has contributed, perhaps more than any other Phayao-born individual, to the growth of the civil society in the province. As a pioneering social activist, she put herself in the vanguard of extensive issue-oriented public campaigns against prostitution in the late 1980s, well before HIV/AIDS became a serious issue in Phayao.

Ladawan on the rise

Ladawan was born on 16 May 1956, into a Thai-lue family in the idyllic Chiang Kham District. Numbering over 100,000 and engaged mainly in agriculture and (petty) commerce,Footnote ⁹⁶ Thai-lues—descendants of the migrants from Yunnan Province in southern China—reside in several upper provinces of northern Thailand—mostly Phayao, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, and Nan. Within Phayao, they are concentrated in the mountainous and less developed districts, notably Chiang Kham, Pong, and Chiang Muan. Of these, Chiang Kham, where Ladawan was born, has the largest population of Thai-lues. Like other ethnic minority groups in Thailand, Thai-lues have faced many kinds of discrimination. Being classified variously as ‘legal immigrants’, ‘legal aliens’, and ‘illegal immigrants’, many (if not all) Thai-lues did not have Thai citizenship in previous decades, which meant that they were denied equal opportunities in education, employment, and social welfare. They were one kind of the ‘others within’ Thailand.Footnote ⁹⁷ As a result, as is the case with many daughters born into poor ‘Thai’ families in rural Phayao as a whole, one major economically viable occupation left for disadvantaged Thai-lue women was prostitution. Their exceptionally fair skin—one trademark of Thai-lues—was much sought after in the sex industry.

Ladawan grew up in this social context, seeing and hearing about many Thai-lue women turning to prostitution. She was able to steer clear of that fatal path, however. Her parents were among the more fortunate ‘assimilated Thai-lues’ who had been granted Thai citizenship. Accordingly, Ladawan acquired Thai citizenship at birth.Footnote ⁹⁸ Her father (named Bunpeng), a strict man of high moral principles who abhorred prostitution, was a teacher—the only teacher—at a small local primary school. As a civil servant, he brought steady, if not much, income to the family. At one point, he also started a small business as a petty merchant. Ladawan's mother, Buajant, supplemented his income by weaving fabrics. Their combined incomes and moral support enabled Ladawan to pursue advanced education. Her two elder sisters, Phensri and Phojana, extended financial help, too. Thus Ladawan attended Chiang Kham Withayakhom, one of the best secondary schools in Chiang Kham, after which she went to two teachers’ colleges in Bangkok—Suan Dusit and Phra Nakhon. In 1977, she obtained a B.A. degree in education from Sukhotai Thammathirat University in Nonthaburi Province. In 1995, she obtained another degree, a M.A. in political science, from Bangkok's elite Thammasat University. These are extremely rare achievements for a Thai-lue or Phayao-born woman of her age at the time. As one approximate indicator of this, amongst the 24,195 women aged 40–44 in 2000 in Phayao—the age bracket to which Ladawan belonged—the sizeable majority (over 87 per cent) received no more than primary school education (13 per cent of them received no education at all), while only 1.6 per cent had university degrees.Footnote ⁹⁹

Although her initial goal was to become a teacher, Ladawan changed tracks after receiving a B.A. degree in 1977, when she got a job as a proof-reader at the Thai News Agency, a state-owned media enterprise under the control of the Mass Communications Organisation of Thailand (MCOT). To her own admission, she got the job through personal ‘connections’ (sen), although it is not clear who arranged it for her—perhaps her university teacher. A year later, she passed the examination to become an announcer at a MCOT-controlled radio station. Then, in 1983, she was promoted to ‘anchorwoman’ for Channels 9 and 11—two of the largest MCOT-controlled broadcasting stations in Thailand—which made her well known throughout the country.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Thus, although she was born into a non-elite Thai-lue family that was far from wealthy, Ladawan became one of the very few successful women from Phayao. She achieved upward social mobility without recourse to prostitution.

These educational and career experiences broadened Ladawan's horizon and made her acutely aware of Phayao's disadvantaged social and economic position in Thailand, the rights of Phayao's women (especially Thai-lue women), and the evil of selling daughters. Over the years, she took an increasingly strong moral stance against prostitution, which she repeatedly espoused in public. She once said in a speech whilst in Japan, the most popular destination for Phayao-born prostitutes:

Ladawan was particularly committed to this cause, probably because Chiang Kham, her home district with a population of only 77,692 (as of 2007), had produced the largest number of AIDS patients amongst all the nine districts in Phayao.Footnote ¹⁰² She was also concerned about the adverse image of Phayao in Thailand, as exemplified by her public statement: ‘I don't want my province to be known as the supplier of young girls for child prostitution’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Likewise, in another interview in 1995, she said, ‘I want to improve the image of the girls from the north that they sell their bodies. . . . I want the girls from the north to enjoy a new image’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ She felt so strongly about resolving the prostitution problem in Phayao that she even wrote a seminar paper on the topic at Thammasat University, where, as mentioned above, she had enrolled in a M.A. programme in political science in her late-thirties.

Ladawan recognized that prostitution in Phayao was a structural problem that stemmed fundamentally from the vicious cycle of poverty and lack of education.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Therefore, she launched several projects in the late 1980s, which aimed to enhance job and educational opportunities for the girls in Phayao. The first project started in 1987, when Ladawan, then a television anchorwoman, placed 74 young girls in a local textile company. In addition, she persuaded a local pharmaceutical company to offer a scheme by which 15 to 20 scholarships are awarded annually to students in Phayao. She also started a radio programme to raise popular awareness of the danger of AIDS.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The villagers’ initial reactions were nonchalance or cynicism. The AIDS epidemic had yet to hit Phayao at the time, and the villagers did not see much point in Ladawan's actions. It was a time when so many village girls turned to prostitution as ‘a matter of course’, and it was unusual for anyone to try to wean them away from that profession. However, the bulk of middle- and upper-class people in urban areas of Phayao, especially the Phayao Association of Housewives, extended moral support to Ladawan. Like Ladawan, they were repulsed by the negative image that women in Phayao in general had to tolerate, ‘just because of what those girls [from poor families] did, which had nothing to do with us’, as one member of the association, a middle-aged civil servant in central Phayao, said to me.

A big and totally unexpected break came in early 1991, when Ladawan was appointed a government spokesperson—the first female spokesperson in Thailand's history—by Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, a widely respected businessman who had served as ambassador to the United Nations and the United States Anand was an interim civilian prime minister appointed by the military following the coup of February 1991, but he proved to be no puppet of the military. In vigorously pushing for all sorts of reforms, often against the wishes of the military, he appointed many individuals of good character and credentials to key political posts on the basis of merit. Ladawan, a 35-year-old woman without any political experience, was one of his surprising appointees.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The fact that Channel 11, for which she was an anchorwoman, is owned by the Public Relations Department of the Prime Minister's Office may have influenced Anand's appointment, too.

Ladawan used her new position to advance her cause against prostitution in government circles. First, she pleaded with then Minister of Education Ko Sawatphanit, another reform-minded appointee of Anand,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ to establish a vocational school in Phayao in an attempt to break the vicious cycle of poverty, low education, and prostitution. Ko, as well as Anand, granted the request in March 1992. Assisting Ladawan's cause was the unprecedented economic boom in the early 1990s, which made state resources more widely available for socially worthy (as well as wasteful) projects throughout Thailand. Ladawan also helped draft and submit a new anti-prostitution bill in early 1992. Although the formation of a new government in April that year thwarted her move, the bill was resubmitted and approved four years later (as will be detailed later). Furthermore in March 1992, she pushed for the passage of a law that granted Thai citizenship to an estimated 100,000 Thai-lues in northern Thailand, including 20,000 in Phayao, who had previously been classified and discriminated against as ‘non-Thai citizens’. The Thai citizenship enabled these formerly disadvantaged Thai-lues to gain suffrage, as well as enhanced access to education, jobs, and social welfare services.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The relatively liberal political environment provided by the reform-oriented Anand administration was propitious for the initiation and success of these actions. It was rather ironic that the military coup that ousted a democratically elected civilian regime helped provide such a liberal political context. She was lucky in a way, for she would have found it extremely difficult to do what she did in any other context.

Ladawan's activities were not confined to Bangkok. In 1992, she launched a project in Phayao, under which young girls from poor families would acquire clothes-sewing (yep-pha) skills. These skills earned them jobs at many garment factories that were being built in Bangkok and its vicinity during the economic boom (see below for details). In the same year, she also started a village-level campaign against tok-khiew in various parts of Phayao. Initially, the campaign encountered resistance. Many villagers criticized her for being overly moralistic, judgemental, and insensitive to the material needs of poor farmers. As Ladawan herself recalls, she ‘often met with a hostile reception from certain families who [were] getting rich from selling their daughters’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Quite likely, she may also have received warnings or threats from the ‘influential people’ who had vested interests in prostitution. Nonetheless, she continued to stand up for what she believed in, winning more admiration and support from the segments of Phayao's population who shared her ideals. Moreover, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic broke out in the early 1990s, and its gravity sank into the minds of the Phayao population at large, resistance to her anti-tok-khiew campaign diminished rapidly.

All these actions, widely reported on television and in the print media and also spread by word of mouth, boosted Ladawan's reputation in Bangkok and Phayao as a vocal and courageous public-spirited activist serious about fighting prostitution. This produced another big break for her in mid-1992. Having heard about her reputation, the Democrat Party led by Chuan Leekpai recruited Ladawan to run for office in Phayao in the parliamentary election of September 1992. Chuan, reputedly one of the most honest politicians in Thailand, is another reform-minded individual who was at the time speaking up in public against child prostitution.Footnote ¹¹¹ Knowing this, Ladawan joined the Democrat Party, the oldest existing political party in Thailand.Footnote ¹¹²

The election result was astonishing. Despite the fact that she was a political novice aged only 36, Ladawan was elected by a landslide. Of all the candidates in Phayao (n = 18), she received the largest number of votes (130,225). The candidate who came in second garnered only 43 per cent of the votes that Ladawan had received.Footnote ¹¹³ In fact, she received the fifth largest number of votes amongst all the candidates in Thailand.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thus, Ladawan became one of the 15 female MPs in a 360-member Parliament (see below for more details).

Concluding comments

I have told a story of how Ladawan, a woman from a non-elite, ethnic minority family in Phayao Province, emerged as a prominent politician amidst a whirlwind of social change caused by years of uncontrolled prostitution. Her rise to power, however, is not simply a phenomenon that occurred solely as a result of local-level social change; it must be situated in the wider context of Thailand's industrial economy, the glamour of materialism, and the booming sex industry tied to the global market. Unbridled prostitution arose out of these structural forces that severely constrained the economic positions, outlooks, and opportunities of village households in Phayao, and Ladawan emerged as a strong advocate against the vice. In the process, she knocked down a godmother-type female politician who had long dominated politics in Phayao. This is an unexpected yet momentous political change that stemmed from the prostitution practice that had gone unchecked for decades.

Viewed from another angle, however, the case of Ladawan, extraordinary as it may seem, actually contains little that should be surprising. The villagers in Phayao are not any different from other human beings. We all struggle to make ends meet within the limited means that are available to us; make silly and terrible mistakes along the way; come to terms with the consequences of those mistakes; learn a bitter lesson; and grope for alternative ways to improve our lives and communities. And we support a politician who offers any such viable alternative. For many villagers in Phayao, Ladawan was such a politician.

Stated more broadly, the empirical findings of this paper call into question the commonly held view that rural Thai politics is ‘dirty’. In this view, social issues are deemed as of marginal importance to the question of who attains power in rural Thailand. As stated in the introduction, a handful of recent works have taken issue with such views, but they are still a minority, and their influence seems minimal. Most other scholars seem to agree or assume that democracy, when introduced in a context where political institutions are weak, only enables immoral politicians to come to power by using violence, vote-buying, family connections, patronage, and other fraudulent means. Such politicians, it is further assumed, are found predominantly in rural areas. This is the view that provided a powerful rationale for the passage of the 1997 Constitution, which contained several clauses that discriminated against rural-based MPs. The military invoked the same view to justify the coup of 2006 and the removal of Prime Minister Thaksin who had allegedly established a huge rural base of support with his scheming money-dumping policies.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ I certainly do not deny that there are politicians who fit the typical descriptions of ‘dirty’ rural-based politicians. But there are others who do not. Ladawan is one of them. Her rise to power as Phayao's MP had nothing to do with the illegal stratagems that are commonly associated with rural Thai politics. She came to power by addressing and championing a social issue that had long escaped the attention of her predecessors. Social issues do matter in rural Thai politics.

This study also has some broad implications for the slowly emergent literature on the relationship between democratization and female politicians in Southeast Asia—an aspect of democratization that has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. As surveyed at the outset, this body of literature identifies four interrelated factors of central importance to the rise of female leadership:

1. (1) elite family backgrounds and a host of political assets that such backgrounds confer—e.g., money, personal connections, and fame;

2. (2) legacies of political martyrdom bequeathed by male kin members;

3. (3) beauty and other physical attributes;

4. (4) the adoption of male characteristics, including violent and belligerent nature.

Again, social issues do not assume much importance in these accounts, except that of Ockey.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Therefore, women, once in power, have made minimal impact on the quality of social life under democracy. Many of them actually have ended up being indistinguishable in behavioural patterns from male politicians.

Ladawan represents a clear departure from such images of female leadership. She is not from an elite family; she did not marry into a politically-influential family, either. The man she married, Suwit, was an ordinary man working in the media industry. While many female politicians have attained power by depending on their husbands who had previously become politicians,Footnote ¹⁷¹ Ladawan did not take this ‘typical’ route to power. On the contrary, it is Suwit who became a politician by depending on Ladawan. The Bangkok-born Suwit won the senatorial election of 2006 in Phayao by using Ladawan's reputation to his advantage (although he failed in the parliamentary election of 2007). Moreover, none of Ladawan's male family members has ever sacrificed his life or career for a noble public cause. Also, she has never made conscious efforts to use her physical attribute to her advantage in seeking political office. Neither has she ‘neutralized’ her gender to adopt masculine characteristics of violence-prone godfathers. Far from it, she retains the characteristics of ‘typical’ Thai women: gentle, soft-spoken, unassuming, graceful, and polite. ‘Femaleness’ does not necessarily get in the way of becoming a leader in a male-dominant Thai society.

What explains Ladawan's ascendance as a politician is what we might call her ‘advocacy politics’. To be sure, the ‘advocacy politics’ alone does not explain her success. As shown earlier, a combination of fortuitous factors—the political and moral support that she received from reform-minded politicians such as Anand and Chuan, plus the economic boom—was particularly important at the initial stage of her political career. Nonetheless, what lies at the core of her success is her own beliefs that drove her actions. Even before becoming a politician in 1992 and before the AIDS crisis hit Phayao, she had started advocating the cause of anti-prostitution. And once in office, she consistently and aggressively promoted the same cause, serving as an outspoken defender of women's rights not only in Phayao but also over the whole country. She thus played an important role in putting women's issues on the national agenda—issues that male politicians had failed to take seriously. Gender matters in politics. In 1989, Prawese Wasi, a leading intellectual and proponent of political and social reforms in Thailand, deplored:

Ladawan brought to popular attention some sides of development that had long been neglected in Thailand's inexorable, fast-track race towards industrialization. In so doing, she provided a hitherto sorely lacking gendered perspective to Thailand's effort to enhance the quality of democracy. She did so, moreover, as an independent actor; she set her own political agenda without having it supplied by her husband or any other male-kin member. She was certainly not one of the ‘ghost candidates’ hired by political parties, which most female candidates in Thailand are, according to Richter.Footnote ¹⁷³

In his paper on political leadership styles in Thailand, Ockey discusses two sharply contrasting types of leaders: phudi (morally good people) and nakleng (tough guys). The former, represented by the likes of Chuan and Anand, are mostly well-educated elites in urban areas, where the level of political consciousness is high. The latter, in contrast, are poorly educated, rural-based gangster-type politicians, adept in the use of patronage and violence.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Several female leaders in rural Thailand fit this type, as exemplified by a murderous ‘radio station godmother’ who ‘appropriated’ the characters of nakleng.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ While certainly not arguing that godmothers can be found only in rural areas, Ockey unfortunately does not discuss the possibility that phudi-type female leaders might exist in rural Thai society. Ladawan is one example of such women. The transition to democracy in the post-1973 period has brought, not just violent ‘bad women’, but also ‘good women’ to power in rural Thailand. Ladawan, moreover, is not simply the passive product of democratization. Through her unrelenting issue-based social activism, she has shaped, albeit in a modest way, the character of Thai society under democracy.

Ladawan is akin to Elang Santa Ana, a Filipino woman whose life and rise to a position of leadership Benedict Kerkvliet describes in detail in his paper—one of the rare studies that depict a sanguine picture of female leaders in democratizing Southeast Asia. Like Ladawan, Elang, a woman from a modest economic background, established her reputation for her strong stance on social issues (e.g., land reforms) that concern ordinary people in her home province of Nueva Ecija. Kinship connections, much less violence, have been of little importance to her political career.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In many respects, Ladawan is the Thai version of Elang. The existing literature on rural politics in Southeast Asia does not give sufficient attention to the values, aims, motivations and activities of women like Elang and Ladawan.

Final questions that might be asked are: To what extent is Ladawan's case representative of rural Thai politics? Is she an aberrant case? Or is a female politician like her more common than the literature has us believe? Not having conducted systematic research on all the provinces of Thailand, I cannot give any unequivocal answers to these questions. However, a cursory survey suggests that Ladawan may be an exception rather than the rule. A good number of female politicians, such as the afore-mentioned Phuanglek and Siriwan, fit the prevailing, less-than-positive descriptions of rural politics and female leadership in Thailand. The wives of Newin Chidchob, Sanoh Tienthong, and Somsak Thepsuthin—the typical rural-based male bosses from Buriram, Sakaew, and Sukothai Provinces, respectively—are other examples of women who have relied on their husbands to attain political posts. I concede that Ladawan may be an anomalous case. Certainly, I do not mean to make any kind of generalization about all female leaders in Thailand on the basis of Ladawan's case alone, further research may reveal that there are actually several other female politicians who fit Ladawan's type. If they are a minority—again, I am quite open to that possibility—I would argue that it is still an important minority, about which much more should be written in order to present a more balanced picture of rural politics and female leadership in Thailand, or in democratizing Southeast Asia more broadly.