An executive interview with KBank HCMC’s representatives revealed the resilient growth of Vietnam economy will make the country an economic powerhouse in Southeast Asia.

Mr. Pattarapong and Mr. Chatuporn in the opening event of KBank in HCMC

Mr. Pattarapong Kanhasuwan – Executive Vice President- KBank: “the world faces inflation at times, but we see long-term potential in the Vietnam market.”

On 11th July 2022, the Deputy Prime Minister Le Minh Khai signed the Decree 86/NQ-CP of the Government on the safe development of the capital market. And the perspective of KBank? 

We really appreciate the Vietnamese government’s effort and welcome the signed Decree to make the capital market safer for all stakeholders. We, as a bank, always focus on the safety of the capital market and proactively manages the risks. We also think that it should be a cooperation of the whole banking system and the government to keep the capital market safer.

How does “tightening” the credit room for fear of inflation affect KBank as a newcomer in the market?

We think that all economies in the world face inflation at times. Normally, the economy goes up and down, but we see long-term potential in the Vietnam market.

Vietnam is the only ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) country that has enjoyed positive economic growth despite the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Its economy has remained resilient, expanding by 2.9 percent in 2020—one of the highest growth rates in the world—and growth is projected to be 7 percent in 2022, according to the Ministry of Planning and Investment.

Agreed with Mr. Pattarapong, Mr. Chatuporn Boozaya-angool – General Director of KBank HCMX Branch says Vietnam’s significant contribution to the region’s economic growth and its ability to continue its yearlong aspiration paths. Vietnam has strong potential for positive GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth and its vast tech-savvy, working-age group, which comprises 60 percent of its total population of 100 million, to be an economic powerhouse in Southeast Asia. The total newly registered capital, adjusted and contributed capital to buy shares, buy contributed capital of foreign investors from the beginning of 2022 reached 14.03 billion USD, as much as 91.1% over the same period in 2021. The country plays a crucial role in our development strategy in Southeast Asia. 

Why HCMC for your first branch in Vietnam?

Back in 2015, we had 2 representative offices in Hanoi and HCMC. In the Hanoi office, we understand more regulators and the head offices of many of our corporate customers, while in HCM city, the team targeted the market, and then we get more understanding about what we can do when we open the branch. In 2022, with years of experience, Kasikorn thinks that we understand the market enough to provide customers with what we have.

The emergence of COVID-19 around the world has promoted the rapid development of the digital economy, which is the driving force for digital transformation: trade is improved, international standards are set for consumers, businesses to participate, and consumers have more choices. Digital platforms have helped connect supply and demand, making the distribution and circulation of goods in the very special context of the pandemic possible. Consumer behaviors that have been shaped in the past two years will shape new consumption habits and new business models in the future, thereby helping the digital platform model develop more after the pandemic.

We passionately believe that digital banking and technology-enabled services will help engage and onboard more individuals and businesses on more sustainable financial services. Vietnam’s digital economy is growing rapidly, we expect corresponding developments in the financial sector.

With that situation, KBank aims to penetrate the Vietnamese market using asset-light strategy without focusing on having many branches.  Instead, we plan to make KPLUS the primary digital channel to serve customers. The bank will use KPLUS as a user-friendly digital banking platform to serve customers in Vietnam that meets customers’ needs anywhere, anytime for all groups of customers. We have also started offering KBank Biz Loan with an end-to-end digital process where customers can apply for loan online and get money debited into their account without coming to the branch.

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Source: Vietnam Insider

The conservative kingdom’s monarchy was all-powerful. Then came tens of thousands of student protesters demanding reform.

The protesters, bleary-eyed from sleeplessness but flush with adrenaline, chanted “Down with feudalism, long live the people!” as they moved straight for the Grand Palace.

It was early on September 20 and Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul, a leader of a radical faction of students from Thailand’s Thammasat University, was demanding to see a representative of the king’s privy council that morning. She dismounted the truck she was standing on and walked towards the palace, which was guarded by hundreds of police.

King Maha Vajiralongkorn, or Rama X, lives mostly in Bavaria, Germany, and had only been back in Bangkok briefly during this pandemic year. The royal flag, flown when the monarch is presiding at home, was up, although the king — as has been the case for most of 2020 — was not in.

Panusaya, 22, who goes by the nickname Rung (“rainbow”), carried a list of 10 demands to reform the monarchy, the institution at the pinnacle of Thailand’s political order. These included cutting royal budgets and abolishing the lèse-majesté or royal insult law that jails those convicted of defaming the royal family for up to 15 years. She has become one of the best-known faces of a movement with many leaders; one cartoon showed her standing on a truck, wielding a flame-throwing guitar.

The rally began with the kind of irreverent festival antics typical of Thailand’s past four months of near-daily protests. A boy posed in a midriff-baring crop top — a garment associated with the king, who has been photographed wearing them in Germany — as a girl mock-venerated him in the ritual prostration Thais adopt at royal audiences. Jutatip “Ua” Sirikhan, the leader of the Thai Students’ Union, stood outside Thammasat selling LOVE CAT HATE COUP T-shirts — a reference to the military’s dozen seizures of power over the past century.

But proceedings turned more serious around 11pm, when Rung took the stage. “My name is Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul,” she said, addressing Vajiralongkorn directly and startling listeners by dispensing with the phraseology Thais must use when speaking to the king. “I’m one of the people you might see as mere dust under your feet. I’d like to tell you that dust like us has rights and voices too.”

Without naming the king, Arnon Nampa, another protest leader, recounted a list of questions for him, including a request to cut royal spending at a time when some Thais were skipping meals. “Don’t you see the country is suffering?” he asked.

After the students left the stage, the sound of power tools was heard. By morning, a plaque bearing the date September 20 had been planted in Sanam Luang (Royal Ground), a former public plaza alongside the palace used mostly for events honouring Thailand’s powerful monarchy. The plaque bore the bold and, to many Thais, revolutionary, if not seditious, declaration that “Thailand belongs to the people, not the king, as they deceived us”. Many Thai media declined to translate the inscription in full for fear of breaking the law.

That morning, Rung presented the students’ demands to Bangkok’s chief of metropolitan police, then turned to the crowd and posed for pictures, her fingers raised in the protesters’ now famous three-fingered salute. “We have won,” Arnon declared. “We have won.”

This is not a story about Thailand’s multibillionaire king, though he increasingly sits at the centre of it. It is about the young people — or as they call themselves, with a sense of their place in history, “The People” — who are challenging the kingdom’s constitutional order and the culture of unquestioned reverence for the monarchy. Their fight for democratic rights against forbidding odds is being followed closely at home and abroad.

With a remarkable degree of self-possession — and courage, given the threats of imprisonment or death that royal critics face — they are questioning everything they have been taught in school. Their anthem is “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from the musical Les Misérables, which has the refrain: “A people who will not be slaves again.”

Thailand’s student movement began coalescing in July around a pro-democracy group called Free Youth, which demanded Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha resign. As the protests grew, it aligned itself with the People’s Party (later The People) and began making further demands, most notably limits on the power of the king, something that was previously unthinkable.

The students see themselves as the heirs to generations of Thai leftists who have fought the kingdom’s illiberal order for the past century. But this is a movement unlike any Thailand has seen before.

Young people with ideas about upending the country’s feudal hierarchy are a recurring theme in Thailand. In 1932, King Prajadhipok, Vajiralongkorn’s great-uncle, faced an uprising by officers and civil servants, who imposed a constitution on him. This revolt remains the historical touchstone for the new generation of protesters. A few years later, the king’s assets and land were put in the care of the Crown Property Bureau (CPB), essentially Thailand’s sovereign wealth fund.

But from that low point, Vajiralongkorn’s father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, built back the monarchy’s power and public esteem, with the help of a powerful military and the support of the Americans, who saw his country as an important anti-communist regional ally.

The cultish, gilded portraits of royal family members on Thai roadsides and in buildings proliferated during Bhumibol’s 70-year reign, which ended with his death in 2016. So did the strengthening of laws shielding the family from criticism, most notoriously the lèse-majesté law.

Thailand has been run by a triumvirate of power — palace, governments and the military — throughout its modern history. Some Thais add as a fourth pillar the prodigious Chinese-Thai family conglomerates that have grown rich and built the economy in symbiosis with the royal house. When things get out of hand, the military steps in, as happened in 2014 when Prayuth, then army chief, led a coup against populist Yingluck Shinawatra’s elected government. Afterwards, the regime sent scores of dissidents to “attitude adjustment” sessions, and some fled into exile.

When Vajiralongkorn took the throne in 2016, he set about further strengthening the trappings of royal power even as he lived abroad. In 2017 he took ownership of the CPB’s assets, company shares and land worth more than $40bn; last year he assumed command over two army regiments. In 2019, he was crowned Rama X in a lavish ceremony and borne on a gilded palanquin through Bangkok.

From being a taboo subject, the monarchy is now front and centre

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, political scientist

But young Thais, surfing the web and already questioning the order of things, saw a very different image of their king outside his country, where he spent most of his time in a villa near Munich and more recently in an Alpine hotel. They shared candid photos showing the king and his household relaxing in crop tops or other informal dress.

“From being a taboo subject, the monarchy is now front and centre,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, tells me. “The students at minimum succeeded in making the monarchy a policy issue for discussion and debate.” Under Bhumibol, he adds, “this would not have happened”.

The students have taken pains to keep the protests peaceful, another departure from past Thai political unrest that claimed lives. But they remain unrepentant in targeting the king, as well as a government they see as doing its master’s bidding.

“If a dog in a nearby house annoys you because it keeps barking, would you go out and fight the dog and tell it to stop barking?” protest organiser Parit “Penguin” Chiwarak asked me. “Or would you go out and talk to the owner of the dog to make it stop barking?”

Penguin’s formative moment in activism — and his first brush with police — came in 2018. Dressed as a worker, he approached then-military junta leader Prayuth at a May Day event, gave him a polite clasped-hands wai greeting, and said: “Please resign.” Police dragged him away and kept him for several hours.

Most of the protest leaders are in their teens and twenties (Penguin is 22), female and/or LGBT+, a departure for an arch-conservative society controlled comfortably — or so it seemed until recently — by old men. Schoolchildren, including a group called Bad Students, have joined protests and scandalised adults by raising three fingers at school.

“I love this country despite the fact that there are so many things that suck,” Penguin tells me in a café on Thammasat’s campus, where he speaks of Thailand’s history, which he loves to riff on, its temples, its palaces and its food. “It’s still my home.”

He remembers studying the French revolution in grade 10, aged about 16, and being captivated by the motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité. He also clashed with a teacher who was extolling the “sufficiency economy”, a rural development scheme championed by Bhumibol. “Being an agrarian country that produces raw materials, you get oppressed,” he told her. The teacher told him he had a “rotten heart”.

After Vajiralongkorn took the throne, monuments and plaques commemorating the events of 1932 began to disappear, which progressive Thais took as a sign their country was tipping back toward absolutism. The economy, after booming in the 1980s and 1990s, grew at one of the slowest rates in south-east Asia, thanks in part to its underperforming schools, which have a better record of enforcing haircut rules than excelling on tests.

Thais vented freely about this at home and online with their peers elsewhere in Asia. “This generation grew up with parents who were a lot more liberal,” says Kanokrat Lertchoosakul, a Chulalongkorn University assistant professor who has surveyed more than 150 young people involved in the protests. “Debate within the family is very widespread.”

Although Vajiralongkorn assented to an election last year, it was held under a constitution that weakened opposition parties and paved the way for Prayuth to install himself as prime minister. Ahead of the vote, he vetoed a run for office by his oldest sister, Ubolratana Rajakanya. On the eve of the election, the king urged Thais to “support good people” — widely understood as an intervention by an ostensibly apolitical sovereign against pro-democracy parties.

“This generation grew up with parents who were a lot more liberal. Debate within the family is very widespread

Kanokrat Lertchoosakul, Chulalongkorn University assistant professor

Despite this, Future Forward, a party promising to eject the military from politics and build a more modern Thailand, still managed to come in third, thanks to support from many of the seven million eligible first-time voters. But the regime mounted a raft of legal cases against the party and in February a court dissolved it, angering the young Thais who had voted for it.

Among them were two student activists, Tattep “Ford” Ruangprapaikitseree and his boyfriend Panumas “James” Singprom, who joined in flash-mob protests that began late last year in support of Future Forward. They also formed Free Youth with a third friend, holding their first meeting at a McDonald’s near Thammasat’s suburban Rangsit campus. “I wanted to make young people understand what was going on and what the problems in Thailand are: first, capitalism; second, feudalism; third, all the generals,” Ford says.

Ford grew up with parents who struggled to get by selling clothing and essentials. As a first-year politics student on scholarship at Chulalongkorn, he was part of a group that invited Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong to give a talk, only for Thailand to refuse Wong’s entry at China’s request. “I felt I could no longer be on the sidelines,” he said. “I had to be in the game.”

By the middle of the year, Free Youth set three demands: Prayuth’s resignation, the writing of a new constitution and an end to the harassment of dissenters. Their goal, student union leader Ua told me, was to make Thailand a “fully democratic country”.

Thailand’s young people were further shocked and angered by the disappearance in June of Wanchalearm Satsaksit, a Thai human rights and LGBT+ activist and a critic of the military regime, who was bundled into a car by unknown men in Cambodia and has not been seen since. #savewanchalerm began to circulate on Twitter. Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan including Wong cheered them on.

Free Youth held their first big event on July 18 at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, which commemorates the 1932 uprising. It attracted about 2,500 people and, over the next few weeks, the crowds kept growing. Ua, a third-year Thammasat student who aspires to be a politician, helped organise the event’s stage, security and logistics amid threats that the police would shut the protest down. “When we were growing up, we saw things like the kidnapping of people who spoke out against the government,” she tells me soon after. “My goal is to make the country fully democratic and try to support other things like human rights.”

Elsewhere, a still more radical vision of confronting royal power directly was incubating. Arnon, a veteran human-rights lawyer who, at 36, is older than most other protest leaders, first broke the taboo on criticising the king at a small rally in Bangkok on August 3, when he compared him to the Harry Potter villain Voldemort. “Nobody actually dares mention Voldemort, despite the fact that he’s behind all the evil things going on,” Arnon told me in early August. When I interviewed him, he was coming from court, where he is helping the defence in a long-running lèse-majesté case against a man who “insulted” Bhumibol’s dog.

A week later, ahead of a rally at Rangsit, Penguin and another student, taking inspiration from the writings of Somsak Jeamteerasakul, an academic who fled to Paris after the 2014 coup, drafted the 10 demands for reforming the monarchy at a student office on campus.

In a Thai context, these were extraordinary: in addition to revoking lèse-majesté, the proposals called for cutting the palace’s budget, separating the king’s personal assets from the CPB’s, and ending education that “excessively and one-sidedly glorifies the monarchy”. They also stated: “The king must not endorse any coups.”

“That’s harsh!” Rung told Penguin when she saw it. But she volunteered to read the demands out before a crowd of 10,000 at the rally. Backlit and wearing a red blouse, she threw the pages up in the air when she was done.

If leftwing Thais consider Rung a heroine, she is the accidental kind. The daughter of a middle-class family, she says she studied sociology because she did not have good enough grades to read political science. At Thammasat, she gravitated to the Dome Revolution party, a student union group where discussion of politics and the monarchy was frank. “I don’t know how far this is going to go, how many years, but in the end this movement will succeed,” Rung said in August. “The monarchy is too old to function in this world.”

My goal is to make the country fully democratic and try to support other things like human rights

Jutatip ‘Ua’ Sirikhan, leader of the Thai Students’ Union

Soon after the Rangsit rally, Prayuth warned the students not to “touch” the monarchy, setting the regime’s red line, which remains in place. His government also sent takedown requests to Facebook, Twitter and Google, asking them to block posts deemed anti-monarchy within Thailand. Facebook geo-blocked the Royalist Marketplace, an online news, gossip and comment site curated by Japan-based dissident Pavin Chachavalpongpun. Within a day, he had moved it to a new location and more than two million people have now signed up to read it.

LGBT+ youth were early and enthusiastic supporters of the rallies. Many Thais show grudging, bemused tolerance toward queer people, but the country does not give them full equal marriage, adoption or inheritance rights or the right to change gender on documents.

“Being LGBTQ you won’t get killed, you won’t get physically attacked or face hate crimes, but you don’t have an identity,” says Penguin, who is gay. “It’s a social class. If you are transgender, it’s your duty to be a clown.”

Despite the success of their rallies, the students were bickering. Some of the Free Youth leaders told me they thought the movement should remain focused on ousting Prayuth rather than targeting the king. They said the 10 demands amounted to putting the cart before the horse, and that students should instead push for a democratic constitution, then allow a new parliament to start tackling royal reforms.

Separately Penguin, Arnon and some of the other male leaders were coming under criticism from female activists for remarks they deemed sexist or insensitive, including Penguin’s response to a sexual assault allegation involving a Dome ­Revolution member at Thammasat.

Meanwhile the protests continued to swell in size, reaching their peak at Sanam Luang the night before the People’s Plaque was laid, when tens of thousands attended. (Thai police do not provide official estimates.)

Arnon tells me this was evidence that the calls for reforming “the institution”, as Thais dub the monarchy, had traction. “On September 19 they knew the Thammasat group were organising the protest and would definitely talk about the monarchy, and they still came,” he says.

Authorities began piling criminal charges on the students, including sedition, apparently meting out the harshest treatment to the Thammasat group. Some turned their arrests into online events. Ua livestreamed hers on Facebook, wearing a black “FUCK PRAYUTH” T-shirt and reading aloud from 18th-century US revolutionary Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as she was arrested. Ford and James did a livestream from the back of a police car, speaking about politics and inequality as they drove through Bangkok. “It was as if we were lecturing police at the same time,” James recalls.

But the students’ demands were also expanding the acceptable parameters of public debate. Thai media are now reporting openly on their programme, including the 10 demands (though they mostly still avoid mentioning the king’s residence in Germany). Future Forward, now renamed Move Forward, used its seats on parliament’s budget committee to probe ballooning public spending on the royals, budgeted at 9bn baht (£224m) this year, including a fleet of 38 aircraft earmarked for royal family use.

The People’s Plaque was removed by police the night after Rung, Penguin and the others posed with their hands on it. But it has since resurfaced in 3D printed replicas, T-shirts, face masks and even cookies. Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, Future Forward’s former leader, says the students have done Thailand a service by addressing the monarchy, which he calls the “elephant in the room”. “No one wanted to be the first one to say it, to mention the elephant,” he says. “They are brave.”

Just after 5pm on October 14, a motorcade bearing Queen Suthida and Prince Dipangkorn, the potential heir to the throne, glided by Government House en route to present offerings at two temples. Pro-democracy protesters were gathered at the site ahead of a major rally.

As the Queen’s cream-coloured Rolls-Royce passed, according to camera footage, several raised the three-finger salute. Some chanted “pasii gu” — “my taxes” or, given the crude variant of the word “I” they used, “my fucking taxes”.

The Queen, a former Thai Airways flight attendant who holds the rank of general, came to no physical harm. But early the next day, Prayuth announced an emergency decree outlawing meetings of five or more people, and police dispersed protesters camped around Government House. The tactics were familiar, but what struck many Thais was a principal justification the prime minister used for the crackdown — “an action that had an impact on the royal motorcade”.

Police charged three people under Section 110 of the criminal code — “Violence to the Queen’s Liberty” — a crime so rarely tried that many Thais had not heard of it. Dozens of people, including Penguin and Rung, were arrested. Conspiracy theorists speculated the royal Rolls had been intentionally routed near the protesters to provoke confrontation and justify the crackdown.

But the emergency decree backfired. Protesters, learning from Hong Kong, began staging flash demonstrations on a daily basis, organised at short notice to circumvent police blockades or Bangkok transit shutdowns. Student leaders used code to tell protesters where to go: “Let’s get a new iPad” was a call to meet at Bangkok’s Ratchaprasong intersection, which has an Apple store. “Let’s go pray” meant gather near the Erawan Buddhist shrine. When Ford said he was going to “eat meatballs” one recent evening, it was code that a big protest was about to kick off (the protests are major magnets for food hawkers).

While protesters no longer had the stages, prepared speeches or photo opps of rallies like the ones at Sanam Luang, some brought amplifiers and people spoke spontaneously from the crowd. After police fired water cannons at a demonstration on October 16, protesters began wearing hard hats and using umbrellas to shield themselves.

If protesters were divided before on when or whether to criticise the king, the crackdown unified many. Chants insulting or attacking “Oh” (“royal son”) began to be heard, alongside the usual ones taunting “Tu” (Prayuth’s nickname).

Prayuth lifted the emergency order a week after it was imposed. One theory is he did so to allow counter-protests by royalist “yellow shirts”, who have made their presence known more in recent days. Rumours of a violent crackdown on the pro-democracy youth spread, with protection of the monarchy used as a pretext.

The fears, though entirely speculative, are not unfounded. In 1976, an imagined threat against then-Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn was used as justification for the gruesome slaughter of at least 46 people protesting on Thammasat’s campus against the return to Thailand of ex-military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn.

No one wanted to be the first to say it – to mention the elephant in the room. These students are brave

Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, former leader of Future Forward party

At least nine Thais in exile who criticised the monarchy or the military have disappeared since the 2014 coup. These included two activists who disappeared in Laos in December 2018 and whose bodies were later found on the Thai side of the Mekong river, handcuffed, disembowelled and stuffed with concrete.

The increasingly threadbare myth that the king sits above politics was punctured on October 24, when Vajiralongkorn and Suthida met and praised Thitiwat Tanagaroon, a royalist counter-protester at one of the youth rallies. “Very brave, very good, thank you,” said the king, as he and Suthida greeted well-wishers outside the Grand Palace. His remarks were shared widely online, stirring anger among progressive Thais, who took them as clear evidence their sovereign was taking sides.

Within a few days, the students on the streets had turned the king’s words into a taunting meme. On October 26, I watched as thousands of people gathered in Bangkok to march to the German embassy to confront Berlin, and the Thai public, with the fact that their king lives abroad.

A trans woman led cheers of “Very good! Very brave! Thank you!” punctuating each phrase with claps as a girl nearby did expressive arm gestures and people laughed. Protesters carried signs saying “Sehr mutig, sehr gut. Danke!” (the king’s words in German) and “Papa, komm bitte nach Hause” (Daddy, please come home). “This gathering has no leader,” a male protester on a truck told the crowd through a megaphone. “If anyone wants to talk about any issue, come forward!” The crowd chanted: “Everybody is a leader!”

When I began reporting this story in September, the students told me they expected to be arrested, but that new leaders would rise in their place. Rung told me she was prepared to die if need be.

By the time I finished, Rung, Penguin and Arnon were facing multiple criminal charges and prison time. The leaders who were still free were taking a more behind-the-scenes role, allowing speakers to step up as they wished. The student leaders, once split over whether and when to press for monarchy reforms, are now unified in demanding them.

The unrest is drawing more international attention than before — and it too is focusing on the king. In Germany’s Bundestag, foreign minister Heiko Maas said he was “keeping an eye on the activities of the Thai king while in Germany” and made it clear that Berlin did not want him conducting affairs of state while there. Questions about the king have begun to recur regularly at government press conferences in Berlin.

The US, Thailand’s main military ally, has urged peaceful protest and dialogue and debunked an online rumour that Washington was supporting the protests, but has mostly stayed silent. So has Japan, Thailand’s biggest foreign investor.

Rumours of a coup, which surface perennially in Bangkok, have grown acute in recent days, as have unconfirmed reports of back-channel talks between government and protesters. Yellow-shirt counter-protesters have begun to make their views known online and in person, accusing students of being “nation-haters”. Prayuth broached constitutional reform at a recent extraordinary session of parliament, but MPs spent much of the session vilifying the protesters. He also recently made a reference to “foreign interference” in Thailand, though he did not say by which country.

If the students have any reason to hope they might succeed where Hong Kong’s protesters failed, political scientist Thitinan points out, it is that Thailand does not have an outside power like China poised to crush them. And, say observers, given that some of the most fearless protesters have been teenagers, a new generation of dissenters is on the way. “The real change will come in the next two to three years, when these high-school kids enter university,” says Kanokrat, the Chulalongkorn researcher.

Meanwhile, the protest carnival rolls on. Outside the German embassy last week, where several thousand people gathered, youths commandeered a police truck to display T-shirts emblazoned with the People’s Plaque and the three-finger salute. As always, food vendors (who some Thais jokingly call the CIA because of their uncanny foreknowledge of protest sites) were there, selling sugar-cane juice and sausages. A quartet of drag queens danced in formation and people chanted “Prayuth, bastard”. The protest broke up by 10pm and the crowd dispersed in preparation for the next day.

By John Reed @ Financial Times

John Reed is the FT’s Bangkok bureau chief. Additional reporting by Ryn Jirenuwat

Thailand is to ease its novel coronavirus procedures to allow more patients from abroad to get treatment from next month, a top health official said on Thursday, after appeals from hospitals eager to treat their overseas patients.

Thailand is a major hub for medical tourism, drawing patients from Asia, the Middle East and beyond. In 2019, it recorded 632,000 overseas patients who spent 122 billion baht ($3.9 billion), according to government data. Reuters reported.

But restrictions to fight the coronavirus have seen most foreign patients, along with most foreigners in general, kept out since April.

While there is no formal ban on foreign patients – except on anyone seeking treatment for COVID-19 and ailments that would draw on resources to manage the outbreak – they need approval for travel, which can be slow and difficult to get.

Only 172 foreign patients have been allowed in since a first easing of requirements in July, senior health official Tares Krassanairawiwong told Reuters, adding that 740 people had made official requests for entry.

But now more health facilities would be allowed to accept foreigners again, and more are expected to come.

“In phase two, another 100 hospitals and clinics will be approved to receive patients, from 120 today,” Tares said.

But hospital operators say the process has been slow and they have hundreds of overseas patients needing their treatment, some urgently.

“Four of our patients have died because they couldn’t get in,” the chairman of hospital operator Thonburi Healthcare Group Pcl, Boon Vasin, told Reuters.

“It’s a humanitarian issue because some countries don’t have the capacity for advanced procedures,” he said, citing patients needing treatment for heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Boon said approvals were inconsistent and he urged authorities to clarify and relax the process.

According to Reuters, Thailand has had 3,404 confirmed coronavirus infections and 58 deaths and has gone more than three months without a case of domestic transmission.

Tares, who heads the Department of Health Services Support, said the procedures had to ensure safety but he expected the approval process to be faster.

He said he also expected people would be allowed to cross land borders from neighbouring Myanmar and Cambodia, major sources of patients.

($1 = 31.2100 baht)

Reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng; Editing by Robert Birsel

Talk of forming safe “travel bubbles” has stalled due to new outbreaks in other countries like Vietnam.

Thailand is not likely to open its borders to international leisure tourists within this year, a deputy governor of the the Tourism Authority of Thailand said.

Thai government applying “cautious” approach to reopening borders

According to TTG Asia, the deputy governor, Chattan Kunjara Na Ayudhya, said the Thai government has not talked about reopening the country, nor discussed a timeline for that during weekly Covid-19 meetings.

They are “very, very cautious” when it comes to reopening borders, which is why he sees “no signal” that borders will open this year, Ayudhya said, adding that the tourism industry is facing a lot of pressure at the moment.

He said the “high season” during the Christmas period is in “jeopardy”, adding that he is not optimistic about Chinese New Year in February next year.

Talk of forming safe “travel bubbles” stopped due to new outbreaks

He also said while there was talk in the previous month about forming “travel bubbles”, discussions have not continued due to the outbreaks in many countries Thailand was hoping to get tourists from, which “unfortunately”, includes Vietnam.

Nevertheless, more groups are now allowed to enter Thailand under strict measures.

Besides diplomats, United Nations officials, businessmen and investors whom the government has approved, film crews and exhibition personnel are now allowed to enter.

But these arrivals are limited to visitors from Japan, South Korea, Singapore and China, including Hong Kong.

Furthermore, each arrival must be quarantined for 14 days.

Ayudhya said the government is taking “a wait-and see attitude” currently to see how current groups allowed into the country do first.

Alternative plans to boost the economy

The Thai government is also looking to allow medical tourists into the country.

Amid the uncertainties surrounding international travel, Thai tourism operators have proposed a new tourism plan, called Safe and Sealed, to encourage domestic travel, Bangkok Post reported.

The proposal was to enable the survival of tourism businesses and to avoid layoffs in the last quarter of the year.

Thailand’s economy has taken a hit since lockdown measures brought by the Covid-19 pandemic were imposed.

The Bank of Thailand revised growth down to a 8.1 per cent contraction from a previous projection of 5.3 per cent, Bloomberg reported.

The figure is lower than the 7.6 per cent decline during the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

@ The Mothership

The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) on Wednesday officially opened Chao Phraya Sky Park — the first public park over the Chao Phraya River.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha presided over the opening ceremony, with BMA executives led by Bangkok governor Aswin Kwanmuang also present. The BangKok Post reported.

The sky park is built on top of abandoned Lavalin Skytrain structures and entry and exit points were placed at both ends. Lifts have also been installed.

The green pedestrian bridge connects King Prajadhipok Park on the Phra Nakhon side of the river with the Chaloem Phrakiat Forest Park on the Thon Buri side.

The elevated section of the sky park is 8.5 metres wide and 280m long. It is straddled between traffic lanes on Phra Pok Klao Bridge.

It features a garden surrounding a point overlooking the Chao Phraya River and leisure spots. Cycling is banned on the path, but people can dismount and walk with their bicycles.

The park was renovated from the unfinished skytrain structure, built in 1984. It was left abandoned for more than 30 years until the BMA came up with the park idea a couple of years ago.

The renovation has taken about one year and cost about 130 million baht. The BMA expects the park to help promote tourism in the capital.

No government is likely to fall as a result of its COVID-19 response, the impact on politics is still significant.

COVID-19 hit Southeast Asia earlier than most regions of the world, and today the region has over 90,000 cases, with more than 2,700 confirmed deaths. The low levels of testing in all states, bar Singapore, however, should give rise to skepticism. The virus is likely far more prevalent than what governments are admitting, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there are far more deaths than what has been officially reported.

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the economies of Southeast Asia, which are dependent on tourism and exports. The IMF is predicting a global economic contraction of 3 percent, and all evidence suggests that the globalized economies of Southeast Asia will be deeply impacted, with recessions in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

How will COVID-19 impact politics in the region?

On the surface, we see little change. There are only three countries that have scheduled elections or routine political transitions coming months. With a new COVID-19 election bill passed earlier this month, Singapore is moving ahead with elections as soon as infections drop; Myanmar announced that elections will proceed as planned by year’s end, but is introducing a series of administrative changes due to limitations posed by the virus. Vietnam will hold its quinquennial Party Congress in January 2021 and will be sure to capitalize on its COVID-19 management success.

The pandemic response in Indonesia has exposed Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s weakness, but with elections just held in 2019 it’s not going to change the government. In Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines, the response to COVID-19 has simply accelerated the authoritarian trends of the leadership. In fact, COVID-19 has strengthened incumbents, giving them space to capitalize on fear and displace challengers.

This does not mean that all leaders are safe or the trend will last. Weak leaders are more exposed. COVID-19 has constrained patronage to appease challengers, resources have contracted as economies have shrunk ,and the costs of responding to the virus have increased.

Ultra-royalist elites in Thailand have questioned Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s competence for a while, and there has been a growing push to replace him and key cabinet members, though leaving the military-backed coalition in place. Despite reopening the economy, the Emergency Decree remains in place.

Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s attempt to dodge a vote of no confidence has done him no favors. Leaders who lack broad public mandates and face elite challengers are vulnerable and beholden to their allies. They have to spend time politicking rather than focusing on crisis response.

All that said, we’re not predicting any immediate political COVID casualties. The intensity of the economic crisis tied to COVID-19 will be more determinant than the public health challenges.

We see five distinct political trends that will impact politics in the medium term.

The first is an abject failure in governance in many countries. States have basic obligations to provide security, education, public health, and a legal system to their electorates. In country after country, public health systems were exposed to be underfunded and poorly staffed. Governments were caught flat-footed despite seeing the crisis unfold in China and experiencing other public health scares since the 2003 SARS outbreak.

With the exceptions of Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia, governments in the region were slow to respond to COVID-19, sent mixed and confusing messages, peddled quackery, were largely in denial, and proved unwilling to defer to medical and public health advice.

In a region that is based on notions of paternalistic leadership, including the region’s few democracies, where people are not supposed to question the state, there is now a growing realization that government does not know best. Revered politicians have fallen off their pedestals.

Demands for greater competence and embrace of science-based approaches, especially among the younger generations, is sowing the seeds of new political forces. Civic-mindedness has already sustained mobilization at local levels and it is only a matter of time until such sentiments translate into greater demands for accountability and political movements. In Indonesia, the hashtag “Whatever Indonesia” is trending; an expression of frustration with the government’s chaotic response.

It is telling that in Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines the governments immediately adopted emergency decrees. Indonesia’s president considered adopting one. Governments were unable to cope with the pandemic with existing institutions and authorities and aimed for extended power, but these emergency powers, in all cases, were used to go after dissent first.

Second, the weakness exposed by COVID-19 has caused militaries to gain more prominence.

In Indonesia and the Philippines, the weakness of the government response has forced the presidents to rely on militaries and security forces to backstop their flailing responses.

In Indonesia, this has been welcome news for the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI), which has sought to claw back many of the civil-administrative powers that it lost following the collapse of the New Order regime in 1998. Jokowi’s entire COVID-19 response team is staffed by acting and retired generals who are responding with an insurgency-based approach, an abject failure as the pandemic continues to spiral out of control.

We have seen the same thing in the Philippines, where Duterte’s COVID-response team is comprised of retired and acting generals, not medical professionals. The result has been a militarized response not informed by public health. Meanwhile, Duterte has called security forces to shoot people who violate quarantine orders on sight.

In Myanmar, the military has assumed a role in crisis-management, pitting itself against Aung San Sui Kyi’s National League for Democracy during an election year and at the same time using the distraction of the crisis to ratchet up fighting in ethnic conflict areas.

While regional militaries are providing order and using the crisis to accumulate power (and money), they are also exposing their poor capacity to manage public health problems.

Third, the greater role that security forces are playing accentuates authoritarianism. Many governments are adopting securitization to address the crisis and simultaneously cracking down on critics of the crisis response. This is worryingly happening in the region’s more open regimes.

In Malaysia, we’ve seen a shocking attack on the free press, which for the past two years had seen the most notable improvements in the region. A journalist was summoned to police headquarters for her reporting on the roundup of migrant workers. While there is no evidence of an overall shift in government policy to reverse the positive trajectory on press freedoms, such incidents point to increased intolerance of alternative views.

In Indonesia, circumstances surrounding the charges against researcher Ravio Patra, who raised questions about Jokowi’s COVID-19 response, raise even further questions.

COVID-19 is being used to curb discussion and necessary criticism – often dismissed and framed as “disinformation.” Thailand, Singapore, and Cambodia have all wielded their “fake news” laws to that effect, while Duterte has increased his use of the cyber crime law to target dissenters. This comes at a time where governments are breaking down the boundaries of privacy via the centrally controlled use of applications to track and trace citizens.

Fourth, the pandemic has exposed the glaring inequities around the region. Singapore, which received accolades as being the “gold standard” of pandemic responses, has seen the largest number of cases in the region. An overwhelming majority of the more than 35,000 cases (as of June 1), have been in the crowded dormitories for the 324,000 migrant workers who make the country’s first world living standards possible.

Thailand, whose excellent public health and medical systems have responded well to the crisis, has been unable and unwilling to address the large numbers of poor that can ill-afford a prolonged shutdown. COVID-19 has seen a rise in other health problems, as well as hunger and helplessness. In Thailand the number of suicides has soared.

Thailand, according to a the 2018 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, is the most inequitable society in the world, a trend that has been exacerbated since the 2006 coup d’etat. The military and ultra-royalist elites simply do not care about the underclass, and as such the government has done little to support them. Thai government official are now predicting that some 14 million workers could be unemployed in the second and third quarters of 2020.

But inequality is rife around the region, and all countries have rising Gini coefficients. A prolonged economic recession will further exacerbate existing inequalities. The region’s social safety nets have serious holes and do not provide broad cover for those who need them.

In the Philippines, Duterte has tried to direct COVID-19 relief funding to the poorest segments of society, but simply doesn’t have the resources to do so in a meaningful way. The Indonesian and Malaysian governments are in a similar predicament – although in Malaysia’s case the former Najib government decimated the country’s finances in the 1MDB scandal.

COVID-19 spread through globalization, but it is a stark reminder that what made the rapid economic growth in Southeast Asia possible has been distributed inequitably. Unless the poorest and most marginalized of a society have adequate protections, then no one does.

The final trend is the growth of polarizing, identity politics, exacerbated by a vociferous religious fringe and rising xenophobic nationalism. This is not new. We’ve seen extremists Buddhist monks in Myanmar fan the flames of a genocide, the sudden reassertion of chauvinist identity politics in Malaysia, and the wielding of Islamist politics in Indonesia.

Both governments and the people have already proven quick to scapegoat certain communities for the spread of the pandemic. Thai leaders blamed Western tourists, ignoring community transmission. In Singapore and Malaysia, the blame quickly fell on migrant workers. In Indonesia, Islamists immediately resorted to their default position: blaming the Chinese community.

In any crisis, there is an innate response to scapegoating, but what is so telling in COVID-19 is that governments are not stepping in to counter those destructive narratives, instead often using them to distract from their own responsibility and their lackluster responses.

Extremist religious groups are poised to take advantage of both the emotions of COVID-19 – fear and insecurity – and well as government weaknesses; they will capitalize on the inequities of society and to try to mobilize their constituents through scapegoating out-groups.

Despite these trends that should cause alarm for governments and the elites who back them, they have several things in their favor. First, the weakness of the political oppositions. While we have seen the Thai and Philippine presidents further consolidate their authoritarian grips and go to lengths to crush the free press, the reality is that they have sustained a long-term assault on the political opposition.

Duterte has jailed political opponents on trumped-up charges, marginalized his vice president (who hails from the opposition party), and trounced opposition figures in the midterm elections. With a stacked parliament and supreme court, Duterte has wielded the police as a hit squad in his war on drugs, without any due process, oversight, or accountability. COVID-19 has seen even greater attacks on the opposition and the shuttering of the largest media conglomerate.

In Thailand, the military-backed government has used the courts to dissolve political parties and bring legal cases against opposition figures, already having stolen an election in March 2019. The government wields enormous coercive legal powers through its arbitrarily applied Computer Crimes Act and lese majeste provisions of its criminal code.

In Indonesia, the opposition was largely co-opted by Jokowi when he brought his long-time political rival Prabowo Subianto into government as the minister of defense. The remainder of the opposition is a very loose coalition of parties that have little ideological or policy affinity for one another.

In Malaysia, the recently ousted Pakatan Harapan faces divisions over leadership and grapples with winning a new national base, especially among Malays, and among its own base who are dissatisfied with their slow record of implementing reforms while in office from 2018 until February of this year.

In Singapore, an expanded opposition has yet to resolve internal differences. While people may cast votes for the opposition, it is usually only a way to signal displeasure with the ruling People’s Action Party rather than voting for an alternative.

In short, political oppositions across the region are weak, divided, and largely unable to work together. In several cases, they are simply not up to the task of governing at all.

The second thing in favor of governments is the ability to distract. Governments can manufacture security incidents and political crises. As no country in Southeast Asia has a truly free press, governments can use mainstream media to push certain narratives. They have more resources at their disposal to rent a mob or an army of cyber trolls to shape opinions on social media. While there may be opposition and dissent, the government has greater coercive power as well as the ability to mobilize. COVID-19 at least in the short term limits the ability for mass protests, forcing criticism to be localized or online.

The third tool at their disposal is patronage. While traditional patronage has shrunk in COVID-19, we will likely see the fire sale of government assets to cronies or potential political rivals as governments face soaring budget deficits amidst recession. Increasingly, as has happened in earlier crises, regimes will shore up oligarchs as policies move toward protecting elites over ordinary citizens.

While no government is likely to fall in the short term as a result of its COVID-19 response, the impact on politics is significant. The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in governance capacity, weak leadership, and rising inequalities, to which governments have responded with an overreliance on security forces and onslaughts on critics. At the same time, they have tried to buy off challengers through patronage, keeping the political opposition weak and allowed distracting scapegoating narratives to take root — exposing their own fragility. In the short term COVID-19 has been a political opportunity for many governments, but as the crisis deepens with contracting economies the pathogens within these regimes may also spread.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College, Washington, DC and an adjunct at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. The views are his personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of the National War College or the U.S. Department of Defense.

Bridget Welsh is Honorary Research Associate, UNoARI, University of Nottingham Malaysia and a lead author of the Asia Barometer Surveys.

This article originally posted on The Diplomat

With news that many countries in Europe are reopening to tourism in time for summer, travelers with their sights set on Asia are anxiously awaiting word on when they’ll be given the green light to visit their favorite destination.

As of now, those with Thailand in mind will need to wait at least a few more months before packing their bags.

“It is still dependent on the outbreak situation, but I think at the earliest, we may see the return of tourists could be the fourth quarter of this year,” Yuthasak Supasorn, governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT), tells CNN Travel.

And even then, he says, there will likely be restrictions on who can visit and where they can go.

“We are not going to open all at once,” he adds. “We are still on high alert, we just can’t let our guards down yet. We have to look at the country of origin [of the travelers] to see if their situation has truly improved. And lastly, we have to see whether our own business operators are ready to receive tourists under the ‘new normal’.”

Similar versions of this strategy are already being looked at in the region — referred to as “tourism bubbles.” Basically, a country will open borders reciprocally with destinations that also have their coronavirus situation under control.

Once Thailand does open to international tourists, they’ll likely only be able to visit certain spots, says Yuthasak.

“We have studied a possibility of offering special long-stay packages in isolated and closed areas where health monitoring can be easily controlled — for example, Koh Pha Ngan and Koh Samui. This will be beneficial for both tourists and local residents, since this is almost a kind of quarantine.”

Yuthasak says they’re finishing up a framework to restart tourism, but much of the decision-making lies in the hands of the CCSA — the Center for Covid-19 Situation Administration — which will decide when is the best time to open the border.

Phuket-based Bill Barnett, managing director of Asia-focused consulting firm C9 Hotelworks, says “baby steps are needed” to reignite international tourism.

“The next step is bilateral agreements between countries,” he says. “Thailand’s good standing in the face of the crisis with China, along with strong pent-up demand, make it a logical short-term solution for overseas tourism to return to the Kingdom.”

For now, Thailand isn’t taking any chances and the country’s borders are firmly shut.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand (CAAT) has issued a temporary ban on all international commercial flights into the country until June 30, excluding repatriation flights. The Thais who do return on these flights are put into quarantine facilities for 14 days.

Meanwhile, on May 26, the Thai Cabinet agreed to extend the nationwide state of emergency until June 30.

Thailand has seemingly managed to avoid the ravages of the virus experienced by many other nations around the world.

When this story was published, the country had recorded 3,042 Covid-19 cases and 57 deaths. It’s reporting only a handful of new Covid-19 cases each day — occasionally even zero. Instances of local transmissions are low, with most recent Covid-19 infections discovered in quarantined returnees.

Country kicks off domestic tourism push, eases lockdown measures

Thailand is now focused on reopening to domestic tourism in June, says Yuthasak. Resorts and hotels in some tourism destinations throughout the country have already been given the green light to reopen, including in Hua Hin, a popular beach resort about 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of Bangkok.

Nationwide lockdown measures put in place in late March have been easing in stages throughout May.

Malls, markets, museums and some tourist attractions have already reopened and more are slated to follow. Bangkok’s Grand Palace, for instance, will reopen June 4.

National parks, theme parks, stadiums, spas, massage shops and cinemas remain closed, but local media reports some will likely be given the go-ahead reopen in June.

Restaurants — limited to offering only delivery and take-out services in late March — can now allow customers to dine in but are banned from serving alcohol and must adhere to strict social distancing measures. Pubs and night clubs remain closed, and a curfew is in place from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Local transport networks are increasing services, including rail and bus lines, while airlines are upping the number of domestic flights.

Phuket International Airport, however, remains closed until further notice.

Thailand’s most popular tourism island emerged as a coronavirus hotspot in March, facing the highest infection rate per capita out of all of Thailand’s 77 provinces.

As a result, Phuket officials imposed strict lockdown measures and embarked on an intensive drive to test residents.

But with cases slowing to a trickle in recent days, embattled travel industry players question the continued closure of the island’s airport when the rest of the country is opening to domestic flights.

“The Phuket tourism sector at the moment is sad, stunned, annoyed and dismayed at the lack of a defined plan to reopen the airport,” says Barnett.

“The recent 24-hour notice by CAAT of a sustained closure was a hard pill to swallow for a damaged industry. There is no point to open hotels, while the airport is the trigger for reopening. The vague notice and lack of a clarity on when the airport [will reopen] makes it impossible for businesses to plan forward actions.”

Local businesses struggle

Even with domestic tourism starting to kick off in some provinces, it’s only a drop in the bucket.

In 2019, nearly 40 million tourists visited Thailand, according to government data. The TAT estimates only 14 to 16 million will visit this year.

Financially stressed hotels in need of cash flow have already started aggressively selling hotel rooms and vouchers, says Barnett, while also looking to the local market to provide some relief.

“Staycations and road trips are being touted but in a country where tourism represents 12 to 14 percent of the GDP, these small bites are not going to bridge the road to recovery,” he says. “Broader ASEAN bilateral agreements and getting airports open and airlines back in the air is what’s needed.”

Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market, one of the city’s most popular shopping destinations, reopened on May 9. But though Thais and expats have returned, it’s simply not enough foot traffic for vendors to make a sustainable living, says shop owner Tassanee Larlitparpaipune.

“International tourists make up about 50 percent of my customer base,” she says. “Most are from Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.”

Before the Lunar New Year holiday in January, Tassanee owned four clothing shops at the market. She has since closed two and is now considering shuttering a third and shifting her focus to online orders.

Wildlife returns to once busy natural spaces

But the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t had completely negative consequences. As seen in other once busy global destinations, Thailand’s wildlife has benefited from the global shutdown — particularly marine animals.

Marine biologist Dr. Thon Thammawongsawat says the changes he’s witnessed have been remarkable, with animals returning to destinations once crowded with humans.

“For example, pink dugongs were spotted around Ban Pe, in Koh Samet and green turtles laid eggs for the first time in six years at Koh Samui beaches,” he says.

More than 200 of these turtles were born on the secluded beach of the Banyan Tree Samui resort, with three nests hatching between April 4 and 24, according to hotel staff.

A giant mother turtle reportedly laid the eggs in late February and early March, which were then protected by the resort’s resident marine biologist and the local Department of Marine and Coastal Resources.

Other species of turtles have returned to Thailand’s shores to lay eggs, too.

“The most crucial indicator of positive side effects from this crisis is that we’ve seen leatherback turtles lay eggs in the highest amount since we began recording statistics eight years ago,” says Thon.

“Last year, we recorded that there were about 100 leatherbacks hatched. This year, up until now, there are more than 300 hatched and returned to the sea.”

The country’s national parks officials say they hope to preserve some of these gains.

“The department has decided to close national parks — both land and marine parks — every year between two to three months a year,” Sompoch Maneerat, director of information for Thailand’s Department of National Parks, tells CNN Travel.

“Durations and dates will be varied depending on the nature of each location. The purpose is to achieve sustainable tourism, where nature can rest during the low season.”

As for popular Maya Bay, where the 2000 movie “The Beach” starring Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed, Sompoch says it will remain closed until at least 2021, as the ecosystem has not yet fully recovered to an acceptable level.

The bay has been closed since June 2018 part of a rejuvenation program aimed at reviving the area’s decimated corals.

@ CNN



There were no new infections of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) reported in Thailand on Wednesday, for the first time since the pandemic began to spread here, and no new deaths.

Dr Taweesilp Visanuyothin, spokesman for the Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration, said on Wednesday morning that the total number of cases remained at 3,017 and the death toll at 56.

“I am happy, along with everyone who has contributed to disease control… We have been doing better since the reopening of business started on May 3,” he said.

Since May 3, the number of new Covid-19 cases reported daily had been in single figures, except for 18 found among quarantined migrants in Songkhla province on May 4, he said, and quickly explained the discrepancy.

“Actually May 4 was the first day when Thailand did not have a new case of local infection because the 18 cases found on that day came from quarantine facilities. The no-case announcement today makes the zero-case status official,” Dr Taweesilp said.

He encouraged people to keep taking disease control precautions, mainly through hand washing, using face masks, social distancing and cleaning, to maintain the zero-case situation.

“We can relax, but cannot be reckless… Please keep to the new-normal practices. Finally, we may be among the first countries able to end the hardship brought by this disease,” he said.

Dr Taweesilp said that  zero new cases did not come from any leniency in attempts to find infected people. He said that from May 1 health officials had expanded criteria for Covid-19 tests on people, to cover those with mild symptoms.

This month 34,444 people had been tested and only 0.18% of them were positive for Covid-19, he said.

Over the previous 24 hours, 46 more patients had been deemed recovered and discharged, raising the total recovery cases to 2,844, while 117 patients remained at hospitals.

Dr Taweesilp said global Covid-19 cases stood at 4.34 million with 292,893 deaths. The United States had the most cases at 1.41 million and the most deaths at 83,425.

@ Bangkok Post

Key tourism sector incompatible with social distancing measures

The social distancing measures required to fight COVID-19 have been painful for Thailand’s traditional massage and medicine sector, which has been shut down by controls aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus and will continue to face restrictions as the country slowly emerges from its nationwide lockdown.

Yumiko Kase, the Japanese CEO of the Asia Herb Association, one of Thailand’s most successful therapeutic massage chains, says the crisis makes previous bouts of political turmoil and flooding that have disrupted business look like “mere inconveniences.” But she and other industry leaders believe the 2,000-year-old industry will recover.

Thailand’s spa and massage sector is the world’s 16th biggest, and the largest in Southeast Asia, with an estimated annual turnover of 35 billion baht ($1.08 billion) according to Creative Spa & Wellness Thailand, an industry group set up by the Thai government’s Office of Creative Economy Promotion. It is also a key element of the tourism industry, providing tens of thousands of jobs, and was growing at 8% a year before the pandemic, according to the OCEP.

Now, though, most foreign tourists have left the country and virtually all public facilities, including spas, massage parlors, restaurants and shopping malls have been closed for more than a month. There is no official figure for the number of massage businesses, but there were 2,760 registered spas in Thailand in 2017, according to the Global Wellness Institute, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes global wellness. Spa businesses are closely associated with the massage industry.

On April 28, the Thai cabinet extended the country’s emergency regime by another month, to May 31, although it said restrictions would be relaxed in four stages every 14 days. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration agreed on April 29 to allow the reopening of eight categories of locations and businesses, and has proposed those measures to the central government. Businesses such as restaurants, markets, hairdressers and clinics were included, but massage parlors and spas were not on the list.

Kase’s chain specializes in herbal ball therapy, in which steamed herbs are used to massage the body — a treatment she says she discovered after being stricken by back pain while visiting Thailand’s Ko Chang island in 1999. After returning to Japan, Kase researched the treatment, which is said to boost the natural healing powers of the body, and returned to Thailand in 2000 with 3 million yen ($28,000) to invest.

She now has five branches in Bangkok, three elsewhere in Thailand and two in Cambodia. Before the coronavirus crisis the Asia Herb Association had 330 employees in Thailand and 100 in Cambodia, and annual revenues of 1 billion yen from the spas, an organic farm and sales of organic products.

Thailand’s traditional massage industry is sometimes thought of as part of the sex industry. But the sector has worked hard to clean up its image in the past 10 years, says Yukihiro Mino, director of the Japanese division at the International Training Massage School in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand.

Thai traditional massage is designated by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and was included in the organization’s World Heritage list in 2019. “But as long as there is a vast sex industry in Thailand, it will be hard to get rid of that bad image for the Thai massage industry as a whole,” says Mino, who has been teaching Thai traditional massage in Chiang Mai for more than a decade.

Kase, a serial entrepreneur, says she has sought to keep her spas clean to protect her company’s image. “It’s also important that we give our therapist an education to be good therapists,” she says.

But Kase admits to concerns over how long the crisis might persist. She has no intention of giving up on her business, she says, “although I cannot be 100% sure because we may have some funding issues if this present situation continues for a long time.”

No government assistance is being provided to help traditional massage businesses survive the crisis, although workers who are laid off or furloughed can receive nearly two-thirds of their wages for up to 90 days from the country’s social security fund.

Like other massage experiences, herbal ball treatment requires close contact between masseurs and customers, two-thirds of whom are tourists. “Even if the government says we can reopen in May or June, I do not think customers will return that soon,” Kase said before the latest announcement by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration. “I do not think that many people are thinking of traveling this year. So I am searching for ways to keep our staff and company alive.”

Kheenaravee Vattanasompong, 63, managing director of Toksen Nondawanich, a temple and toksen (mallet massage) center in Bang Nam Priao, on the outskirts of Bangkok, finds herself in similar straits.

Her business involves using a light wooden mallet and wedge to tap pressure points, which is said to release knots and areas of congestion in the body. There is no direct hands-on contact with clients, but the therapy, said to have originated 5,000 years ago in the Lanna kingdom of northern Thailand, cannot be easily combined with social distancing.

Kheenaravee says she discovered her vocation while seeking treatment for a herniated disc. A fluent English speaker with a doctorate in Buddhist psychology, she had been teaching toksen in Greece, the Czech Republic and Germany for more than a year but is grounded for now, like most international travelers. “I had to stop teaching in Thailand and stop my plan to teach overseas and set up our school in Germany,” she says.

However, Kheenaravee believes that customers will be eager to resume toksen therapy as soon as possible, as does her associate, Kazunari Sakurai, 45, who studied traditional Thai massage after suffering a stroke in 2007 and now teaches toksen in Sapporo, on the Japanese northern main island of Hokkaido.

Sakurai, whose toksen school is called SALA, which means “meeting place” in Thai, teaches about 50 students a year and makes the wooden mallets and wedges used for toksen massage. His two-day intensive toksen course costs 75,000 yen.

Sakurai has shifted the intensive course online for now, and says it is unclear how a recent surge of coronavirus cases in Hokkaido will impact his business in the long term. However, he adds that he is not overly concerned about social distancing. “In toksen you don’t directly touch a patient’s body. I might only touch them for one minute. And if they don’t want to be touched I can use a long toksen mallet,” he said.

Kase, who says she has never had to close her branches before, is paying her workers as usual and asking them to do maintenance, cleaning and training. “We have to pay rent, salary and other [items] which cost a few tens of millions of yen a month. So we are not able to continue this for a long time,” she says.

Still, a joint venture with Japan’s Rohto Pharmaceutical, agreed in 2013, has provided a degree of diversification that may help her to weather the storm. The joint venture company, Rohto Asia Herb (Thailand), is focused on developing new organic herbal products and is 60% owned by the Asia Herb Association.

“I do not think massage or herb ball will disappear because this therapy is necessary,” Kase says. Even so, she is preparing for a prolonged struggle to restore her business to prepandemic revenues.

“This coronavirus may come back next year like influenza. It’s hard to predict for the future. But people are healed by people in this kind of therapy. I don’t think that will disappear,” she adds. “We just have to be more careful with hygiene after this experience to deal with the fear of close physical contact.”

KAZUHIKO SHIMIZU, Contributing writer @ Nikkei

Australia to ramp up coronavirus testing

Australia is set to begin widespread testing after securing 10 million Covid-19 test kits, according to a Reuters report citing Health Minister Greg Hunt. The state of Victoria, for instance, said it would set up mobile centers for people to do testing in their homes, offices and while shopping.

The country plans to expand testing this week to those who are not showing symptoms, the report said. The government has said such testing is essential for lifting restrictions and lockdowns. Australia has already started to gradually reopen. — Weizhen Tan

China to hold annual meeting two months later than planned

China’s parliament will hold its annual meeting on May 22 — two months later than originally planned due to the pandemic, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

It said the 13th National People’s Congress to be held in Beijing can now go on as the coronavirus situation in the country has improved, according to the report.

The National People’s Congress, with about 3,000 delegates, typically gathers for a session lasting at least 10 days in Beijing, to pass legislation and unveil key economic targets for the year. — Weizhen Tan

Thailand reports 9 new cases, no deaths

Thailand on Wednesday reported 9 new coronavirus cases, taking the total number of infected people to 2,947, Reuters reported, citing Taweesin Wisanuyothin, a spokesman of the government’s Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration.

There were no additional deaths, and the toll stood at 54. It was the third day the country reported single-digit increases in infection numbers, Reuters reported, citing Taweesin.

@ CNBC