In late June, when my fieldwork in Thailand was approaching the end, the rumors of a possible military coup d’état were widely spread on the Internet. With the escalating border tension with Cambodia, political mess on the leaked phone call between the then-premier Paetongtarn and the Cambodian strongman leader Hun Sen, and pro-military nationalist protests again grew, many worried that, in a country with regular coups (the last one occurred in 2014, initiating political turmoil for years), another military coup would take place.
In a moody afternoon of Chiang Mai’s rainy season, I rode on my rented bicycle to the store where C, a Burmese activist exiled since the 2021 coup in Myanmar, worked. We sat on the outdoor seat at the neighboring café’s garden, as C said he saw a military plane in Chiang Mai’s sky last night. He gestured how he saw it through the window, with a childlike innocence when raising his eyes. It triggered many of his Burmese friends, who were traumatized by the bombs dropped from the planes of the military government in their home country. C also thought it would be another coup in Thailand. “The coup here is better,” he said, “it’s only about Palace and parliament. They don’t shoot people on the street. It’s different.”
Although my primary goals and interests are about Chinese sojourners in Chiang Mai, the issue of Burmese resistance and immigrants has come over me since my first several days there. From the independent galleries to the everyday restaurants, the entanglement of local society, economics, and politics with neighboring countries—particularly Myanmar but also Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—is ubiquitous. Before my arrival, I had considered Chiang Mai a global city because of the large number of tourists and sojourners from the West and East Asia. Its global connectivity, however, is more complicated and differentiated than my previous thoughts. Both the exploitation of cheap labor and sociopolitical imaginations and solidarity from other Southeast Asian countries are part and parcel of Chiang Mai’s internationalism, fluctuating with the shifting geopolitical situation in the region.
For example, in recent years Burmese exiled activists, journalists, and politicians have turned Chiang Mai into “the political town of Myanmar,” as one of my interlocutors called it, while increasingly being scrutinized by the Thai government as the latter moved closer to the neighboring junta. On the other hand, only a relatively small proportion of Chinese sojourners in Chiang Mai would consider them seriously. Some would mention northern Myanmar as a symbol referring to the recently prevailing imaginations in China of Chiang Mai as a dangerous place for its association with Myanmar’s scam centers, which have actually shifted away from northern Myanmar to central regions like Myawaddy. For sojourners, these references are usually sarcastic, invalidating such unnecessary worries through narratives of how peaceful, joyful, and safe life in Chiang Mai is.
A common discourse is that the residents in Chiang Mai, local or sojourning, are more focused on the small joys of everyday life instead of sociopolitical issues. With these assumptions, often accompanied with an understanding of Buddhist philosophy here, the existence of Burmese refugees is usually either invisible or reaching a different conclusion. For instance, a Chinese video held by a sojourner here argued that Thais just let Burmese stay in the refugee camp happily without “disturbing” or managing them, which corresponds to the Buddhist wisdom.
If Burmese refugees are usually invisible to a majority of Chinese sojourners, Chinese are certainly not so for Burmese. Politically, they discussed largely China’s enormous (and not exactly bright) role in the Burmese civil war. Moreover, their livelihood in Chiang Mai could largely rely on its tourist industry, for which Chinese tourists are one of the most important targets. Because of the long-term connections between Myanmar and China, many of them speak Mandarin and think of strategies to appeal to Chinese tourists. For those involved in activism, solidarity with Chinese activists there—who certainly do not hold the same perspective I described above on Thai and Burmese politics—is also valued.
In a community-building event for Chinese sojourners, I heard one passionately speaking: “Chiang Mai is a common choice for the first stop of Chinese stepping out (of the home country) … We need a way to the globe.” Indeed, Chiang Mai is a global city, though appearing to be different from the way New York or Hong Kong are. The dynamics within this global city, where the bodies, labors, and skills from some regions and classes help to support a “regime of images,” in Peter A. Jackson’s words, that caters to ones from elsewhere, are worth further exploration.