Review | A prime minister who modernised Thailand, a diplomat who broke the ice with Mao’s China
- Anand Panyarachun became Thai prime minister after everyone else turned the job down, yet ended up passing key laws to liberalise business and finance
- Earlier, as a diplomat, he launched secret talks on normalising ties with China, then pushed through American forces’ exit from Thailand after the Vietnam war
“People always remember the man who dug the village well,” goes an old Chinese saying. If that’s still true today, Beijing should have fond memories of Anand Panyarachun, the former Thai diplomat who did much to re-establish Sino-Thai relations in the mid-1970s.
The legacy of Anand, 86, who twice served as prime minister of Thailand, is captured in the recently launched Anand Panyarachun And the Making of Modern Thailand, an “authorised biography” compiled and written by long-time Bangkok-based journalist Dominic Faulder.
Faulder says the book took six years and involved more than 100 interviews with key players in Thailand’s recent, often tumultuous history.
The pinnacles of Anand’s political career were his spells as prime minister: the first when he was appointed to the post in 1991-92 after a military coup overthrew the elected government of Chatichai Choonhavan, and the second a four-month spell in 1992 following a brutal military crackdown on a pro-democracy movement in Bangkok.
Anand’s first career, as a senior diplomat in Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, provides valuable insights into the kingdom’s establishment of sound relations with China and communist Indochina – Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (of which only Cambodia is no longer communist.)
