Interaction In The Thai Bureaucracy

Structure, Culture, And Social Exchange

David F. Haas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429727832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Presenting the results of seventeen months of field research, conducted entirely in the Thai language, this study describes and compares the patterns of social exchange of two groups of Thai officials: district-level bureaucrats and physicians in a provincial hospital. Dr. Haas uses a unique combination of anthropological field data and survey rese

1. Historical Background

The civil service of Thailand is interesting for many reasons. Thailand was the only Southeast Asian society to retain its political independence during the colonial period, and it is the only one with an educated class of which most members speak and read easily only their native language. Thai economic and political development have taken place within an unbroken cultural tradition, and therefore Thai official organizations provide an unusually favorable situation for the study of structural and cultural factors as they affect processes of social interaction. Moreover, the civil service is one of the most important sectors of Thai society, and an understanding of its internal processes is of central importance to the understanding of the political changes that are taking place in Thailand. This study describes some of these changes as they manifest themselves at the local level. In order to place the findings of the study in a larger context, I begin with a brief introduction to the history and geography of Thailand.¹

Geography

The country is a tropical one lying in the center of the Southeast Asian peninsula. It is bordered on the east by Laos and Cambodia, on the west by Burma, and on the south by Malaysia. The heart of Thailand is the valley of the Chao Phraya River, a broad flat plain on which is grown the rice that makes Thailand one of the largest exporters of that commodity in the world. The plain is dotted with villages strung out along the canals that provide both water for agriculture and transport for the products of the area. About one third of the population of Thailand lives in the valley of the Chao Phraya, and more than half of the wealth of the country is produced there.

At the base of the plain, near the mouth of the river, lies the city of Bangkok, the economic and administrative capital of the country and its only real city. Bangkok is the principal deep water port and the only major center of industry in the country. Thailand has a long history of administrative centralization; the ancient kings tended to draw all economic and political activities into the capital and to discourage the development of other cultural centers in the kingdom. These tendencies were intensified in the modern period when the kings extended their control of the periphery of the kingdom in order to counter the colonial menace. The result has been an extraordinary concentration of urban population in Bangkok. In recent years the government has worked to reduce this concentration but without much seccess.

North of the central plain of Thailand is a mountainous region with narrow river valleys formed by the tributaries of the Chao Phraya. Rice is grown in the valleys, and orchards are beginning to be found on the hillsides. Lumbering is also an important activity there. The valleys are inhabited by Thais, but the mountians are inhabited by ethnically distenct tribal peoples who have never felt themselves to be a part of Thai society. Now, the government is attempting to integrate them into the society, but this has been difficult task and will continue to be a problem for some time.

The third major region, the northeast, is a relatively arid plateau drained by tributaries, not of the Chao Phraya, but the Mekong River. This is the poorest and most isolated part of the country. Although most of the people there grow rice, the region is poorly suited to its cultivation, and the government is trying to persuade the inhabitants to grow other crops. Some success has been achieved with kenaf (a crop similar to jute) and especially with maize which is now a major earner of foreign exchange for Thailand.

The south is a long penisula. It is a hilly region with fruit and rubber plantations. It is also the site of a substantial tin mining and smelting industry. The four southernmost provinces are inhabited by Malay speaking moslems. These people feel themselves to be foreigners in the Thai speakbuddhist society of Thailand, and the area has some year been troubled by a separatist guerilla movement.

Historical Background

Traditional Thai Government and Society

Thailand was a traditional southeast asian monarchy until the middle of the nineteenth century. She inherited a social and administrative system that had been formalized in the fifteenth century and had endured with few major changes for four hundred years. Under this system the king stood at the apex of society, and it existed to serve his needs. The Thai kings had in earlier days taken a fatherly interest in the welfare of their subjects, but the patriarchal conception of the kingship had been overlaid by the more autocratic and distant notion of the devaraja or de vine king, a notion which was brought into Thailand by the court brahmins who were acquired from the Khmer Empire (Nivat, 19 76).

Under this conception the king was held to occupy so exalted a status that he could not be approached by any but the highest of his subjects. Ordinary people had to shut their windows or face away when the king passed if they did not wish to risk being killed by one of his guards (Neher, 1966:5). Those who could approach him did so crawling and addressed him in an elaborate royal vocabulary derived from Sanskrit in which even the most ordinary actions of the king were given names that were different from their ordinary names. Thus, for instance, the usual polite word for the verb "to eat" in Thai was "t'an, but when the king or member of his family ate, the word was "sawoej". Most extreme was the phrase used instead of the pronoun for "you" when addressing the king. It translates roughly as "the dust under the royal foot which is upon my head." Even today, the royal vocabulary is used in newspaper accounts of the king's doings, and the ability to use it properly is one of the marks of an education person.

The extreme deference that was shown to the king generalized itself down the hierarchy of authority and prestige in society; at each level subordinates showed a deference to those above them that was proportional to the difference in their statuses. These patterns have changed very slowly. As late as 1963 when I was a teacher in a secondary school in rural Thailand, female students would walk up to within three feet of a teacher's desk and then go down on their knees to approach closer, and in 1973, when the research for this study was carried out, elderly villagers would still squat down in the dirt to address a high government official.

Under the king were two types or nobility. First, there were the members of the royal family. These were very numerous because of the institution of the harem, but they were prevented from becoming too numerous by a rule of declining descent. The rule specified that descendents of a king had a lower rank in each generation until at the fifth generation they became commoners. The other type of nobility consisted of the appointed officials of the king. Official positions were in theory not inheritable, but many of them, particularly the governorships of remote provinces tended to become inheritable in practice. Even in the capital, high officials who were able to get their sisters or sisters-in-law into the royal harem and their sons and nephews accepted as royal pages were able to secure their families' positions from generation to generation (Wyatt, 1976).

The nobility were part or a system in wnicn every subject of the king was given rank which was specified by a sakdi na number which referred in principle to the number of rai (one rai = .4 acres approximately) of land that an individual had the right to cultivate. These numbers ran from twenty-five rai for a free commoner to 100,000 rai for royal prince in charge of a major department of government. In between were the ranks of the various officials of the royal administration. The sakdi na of the king was regarded as beyond calculation.

In this system, all of the subjects of the king (except the members of the buddhist sangha, or monastric order) were ranked within the same hierarchy, which indicates that in an important sense there was no real distinction between the royal service and the larger society. Everyone was in the royal service; for, the kingdom existed to support and serve the king. Those who were labeled as royal officials were simply the middle ranks of the society, and, as such, they could command the obedience of those below them, including the commoners who were subject to a corvee or labor tax. They could be required to work for the king or his officials for a specified number of months each year. Each commoner was assigned to a government department² for purposes of labor mobilization. The officials of the department were expected to use the labor to build such projects as canals or temples and to provide rice for themselves and the king under the system known as kin muang (to eat the place).

This assigned right to use labor was the real basis of power and wealth in ancient Thailand. We who live in countries where land is a scarce resource are accustomed to thinking of its possession as conferring wealth and power, but Thailand was, until very recently, a sparsely populated country in which land was available freely to anyone who cared to clear and cultivate it. Even quite close to the capital there were large areas of jungle which were settled only in the late nineteenth century and then only by royally sponsored colonization schemes. In such a situation the possession of land was meaningless without the labor to cultivate it, and the power to command such labor was monopolized by the kind and his officials. This fact, combined with the absence of large cities based on trade (foreign trade was also a monopoly of the king's) meant that there was no class of people (except the buddhist monks who were outside of politics) whose status was independent of the king's will. There were no mercantile class, no class of hereditary landowners, no independent professional associations, and no free cities. The king could say with more justice than Louis XIV ever could, "L'état, c'est moi."

It followed that anyone who wanted to rise in the world or to maintain a social status above that of the lowers levels had to join the royal service. There was no alternative. Consequently, a career in the royal service came to be considered the career for a bright young man. Beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the kings of Thailand, who wanted to modernize their country, enlarged the royal service and improved its technical capabilities. Thus, new career opportunities were created in law, teaching, medicine, administration, and a host of other fields, but still these opportunities were in the royal service. So, even today we find a pronounced preference among educated Thais for careers in that service.³

Moreover, even today, when the society of Thailand has become much more differentiated than it was in the nineteenth century, there is a sense in which the royal service may still be seen as synonomous with the middle ranks of Thai society. For, the largest part of the development of private business and technical enterprise in Thailand has been and continues to be in the hands of ethnic Chinese immigrants and their children and grandchildren, Although most of these people are now citizens of Thailand, there is a sense in which they are regarded as 'not Thai'. From this perspective, the Thai middle class is in the royal service.

We have been considering the royal service of Thailand in its structural aspect as a part of a larger society. If we shift our focus to view that service as a bureaucratic instrument of royal policy, we will be struck by its very limited capacity to serve that function. Indeed, the old royal service was rarely an instrument of royal policy in the modern sense of the term for several reasons. First, in a society like that of old Thailand, the king did not really have many policies in the sense of plans to direct the major economic or social activities of the society. The people existed to serve him, not the other way around, and if he kept the kingdom reasonably free from bandits, administered justice according to traditional religious conceptions, and avoided oppressive taxation, he was considered a good king. He was not expected to develop policies.

Moreover, the king was the prisoner of his own exalted status. He could deal with conditions outside of his palace only through his ministers, and they of course had their own interests and those of their subordinates to consider. Finally, transportation and communication in the kingdom were extremely primitive. There were virtually no roads. When the first missionaries went to the northern town of Chiang Mai in the middle of the nineteenth century, the trip took months, and in 1895 when Prince Damrong, the first head of the reorganized Ministry of the Interior, went on a tour of inspection of some of the provinces, he was informed that no minister from the capital had ever made such a tour before (Siffin, 1966:66). Indeed, most officials never left the capital, and they had no very precise idea of where distant provinces were. No maps of the kingdom existed, and the first survey was conducted by a British team as a continuation of the trigonometric survey of India in the eighteen-eighties. Under these circumstances, the king could not use the administrative system as an instrument of his will in a sustained way. He could galvanize it into action of a specific sort like resisting invasion or building a canal, and he could extract a certain amount of wealth, but beyond that he could not affect the lives of his people very much. They lived in their villages, cultivated their rice fields, and did the best they could to avoid the corvee when it became too onerous.

This system continued right down to the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time, Thailand was confronted with pressures from the expanding powers of Europe that could not be withstood by the traditional polity. Indeed, all of Thailand's neighbors succumbed and became colonies of one or another European power. The Thais were able to retain most of the attributes of sovereignty by a fortunate combination of circumstances. Of these the most important was that Thailand was blessed during this period with a series of strong, long-lived kings who were exceptionally well able to estimate the extent of the European menace and to deal with it.

King Mongkut ascended thr throne in 1851. He had expected to become king in 1824 when his father died, but he had been a monk at that time. So, his brother had become king in his stead, and Mongkut had remained a monk and had devoted himself to the study of Western learning. He had studied astronomy and navigation, geography, physics and chemistry, and the histories and contemporary characteristics of the major Western nations. So, when he became king, he could appreciate better than anyone in his kingdom the full extent of the European menace. He knew that the only way to deal with the Western nations was to accommodate them, to accede to their demands while at the same time modernizing and strengthening the kingdom. In treaties, he agreed to give up the royal monopoly of foreign trade, to limit import duties and to permit extraterritorial rights. He qave up territory to both the French and the British. Domestically, he modernized the coinage and substituted paid labor for corvee on royal projects. Most important of all, however, he had his children educated in English. They were the first generation of Thais to be education in a foreign knowledge.

The Reforms of King Chulalongkorn

King Mongkut was followed in 1873 by his son Chulalongkorn who completely reorganized the administration of the kingdom. He and his chief ministers constructed the system that we find today. King Chulalongkorn's father had succeeded through astute diplomacy in staving off the ruin which had overtaken his neighbors, but the son understood that major internal reforms would be necessary if he were to avoid losing his kingdom. He said,

The greatest difficulty of the present day is the protection of our territory...Today we have Britain at our left and France at our right...We can no longer live in isolation as once we did. In our protection of the country three measures can be taken: Friendly diplomatic relations, the maintenance of defensive forces, and orderly administration. We will administer the country well if we foster opportunities for the people to earn livings so that they are benefited by the government. Then they will pay the taxes which are the economic foundation of the government. Consequently, an effective administration and a fostering of the ways of providing for the livelihood of the people are the most important, final purposes of the kingdom (Siffin, 1966:51).

To begin, with, the king made only modest reforms. In 1874, one year after ascending the throne, he appointed an official to be in charge of all revenues, and the following year he established a "Revenues Development Office" which ultimately grew into a full fledged ministry with responsibility for all revenue collection. The establishment of the Revenues Development Office followed upon an important speech which the king made to the State Council in which he explained the need for greater efficiency in the collection of revenue. He defended this policy by saying that the money was needed by the government for defense, salaries, public works, and internal improvements and not for his personal use.

This was a precedent shattering statement; it was the first assertion in Thailand that the primary responsibility of the government was to the people, and it implied that a distinction existed between crown and government funds, although this distinction was not made official until later in the reign (Vella, 1955:3).

The king also moved tentatively toward remuneration of officials by salaries and away from kin muanq. There had been a custom of giving annual gifts of money to the officials, and over the years, the amounts of the gifts had tended to become standardized. The king continued the process of standardization and, in addition, began the practice of giving the gifts in monthly installments.

Finally in April of 1892, King Chulalongkorn issued the reorganization edict which changed the basic structure of the government. Prior to the reorganization, the government had been arranged in six traditional ministrie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
• 2 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE
• 3 THE DISTRIBUTION OF POWER AT CENTRAL DISTRICT
• 4 INCENTIVES IN THE CIVIL SERVICE
• 5 WORK AND SOCIAL EXCHANGE IN A DISTRICT OFFICE
• 6 THE PHYSICIANS AND THEIR SITUATION
• 7 PRIVATE PRACTICE AND PUBLIC SERVICE
• 8 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• APPENDIX: THE RESEARCH METHODS OF THIS STUDY
• REFERENCES