ABSTRACT
Thailand’s drastic political and economic twists and turns over the past two decades have increasingly inclined the Thai Chinese (Jeks or Lookjins, i.e., Thais of Chinese descent), who dominate its business and political elite and constitute the plurality of its established urban middle class, to the political right as well as toward China. From the main supporters and mass base of pro-Western democratization and free-market economy against the threat of communist dictatorship from China and its allies in the Cold War period, they have turned in recent years into right-wing royalist-nationalists who mistrust and oppose U.S.-led economic globalization, Western liberal values, and majoritarian democracy. In this dramatic shift, China has become a new magnetic pillar in the region whose economic clout, cultural values, and alternative model of political and economic development the Thai Chinese find congenial and appealing and toward which they are drawn.
