One of the first acts of Thailand' coup leaders after seizing power on 19 September 2006 was to abrogate the 1997 constitution. I regret to say goodbye to this constitution, which I have read in parts and in entirety time and again for almost ten years now. I harbour nowhere near the expertise of legal luminaries such as Professor Borwornsak Uwanno or Dr Wissanu Kruea-ngam, who can seemingly write constitutions overnight. Nor have I been an able practitioner in the league of Ajarn Gothom Arya, a fellow participant in this conference. Ajarn Gothom was secretary-general of the Election Commission established by the constitution, and did an excellent job in that first commission. But I did have a small part in my own way in seeing the constitution through in September 1997 when I was in London doing a Ph.D. I launched a campaign online which ended up with 3,500 signatures, mostly from people overseas, who wanted to endorse the constitution. Since then I have paid close attention to the way that constitution was implemented.

BACKGROUND OF THE 1997 CONSTITUTION

Let me begin by discussing the context of the 1997 constitution. Thailand has a long history of constitution-making. There have now been sixteen constitutions in seventy-four years — many constitutions. As recently as the 1970s, it had a constitution almost every other year, in 1972, 1976, and 1978. But the 1978 constitution was important, because it lasted for several years, and provided the rules that underpinned elections in 1979, 1983 and 1986. It was also the basis through which General Prem Tinsulanonda became prime minister from 1980–88.

The constitution of 1978 emerged from the turbulent democratic interlude between 1973 and 1976, and further instability in 1977 that led to General Kriangsak Chamanand' coup. The constitution had bicameral arrangements but with an appointed Senate. There were 252 appointed senators, obviously dominated by the military, and 301 House of Representatives members of parliament (MPs). General Prem was nominated by parliament and accepted the premiership. He was never directly elected.

The fact that the prime minister was not elected — and in addition came from the military — became a sticking point, and the main drawback of this constitution.

The 1870s is an attractive vantage point from which to start a discussion about an intensification in the exchange of “modern” cultural expressions between South Asia and the Malay world. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had brought a host of new people and a variety of new products to the East, and the rapid development of steam navigation facilitated new patterns of their circulation across the Indian Ocean. First landfall in Asia would often be Bombay, which by then was part of a network of profitable steam shipping lines transporting goods and people further east. The unprecedented global economic expansion of that period had far reaching effects on South and Southeast Asia, where colonialism and entrepreneurism shaped the creation of new spaces for cultural production and exchange. An increasingly vast land area was cleared from forests to make way for plantations that needed an enormous influx of labourers to work them, while the products were shipped from port towns that grew into urban centres populated by an amalgam of immigrants seeking new fortunes. It was in these urban centres that small enterprises were established to tap into the dynamics of this new economy. The situation thus gave rise to the circulation of a wide range of new material and cultural products, ranging from bicycles and Swiss-made watches, to newspapers, shows by Indian snake charmers, and British professors giving public lectures about new inventions such as the telephone and gramophone.

The following advertisement from the late 1880s, published in a Malay newspaper nicely captures the opportunities that opened up for people in rapidly expanding towns such as Singapore:

In many ways this advertisement epitomizes the multicultural and commercial character of popular art forms in the Malay world and the contacts it had with the South Asian subcontinent at the end of the nineteenth century.

In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour maintains that the intellectual culture in which we live does not know how to categorize. Using different labels such as science, society and technology, there have always been attempts to “retie the Gordian knot” by criss-crossing the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power. Here I am not moving along Latour' corridor using the Gordian knot as a metaphor for the beginning but rather in its conventional way of solving a difficult problem, so it is not “retying” but “untying the Gordian knot”.

But then anyone who is remotely familiar with this Greek legend will certainly notice the “mistake” in my title since it is generally believed that the knot cannot be untied; it needs to be cut. Alexander the Great demonstrated that. The “mistake”, however, is intentional because the thesis here will be to prove that Alexander, great as he is, is indeed wrong when it comes to political policy dealing with ethnic majority/minority relations because the Gordian knot cannot be cut but untied — as in the southern Thailand case and perhaps elsewhere in the world. I will return to Alexander later.

THE NRC REPORT AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Let me begin, however, with a few words about my work with the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) headed by former Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun. The final NRC report was released on 5 June 2006, but unfortunately it came at a time when Thailand was undergoing acute political conflict at all levels. The report was a victim of that. The government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinnawatra paid little attention to it. After the 19 September coup, when General (Ret) Surayud Chulanont became prime minister, especially during the first six months, he seemed to have done some things in line with NRC suggestions, including going down to the south and offering his apology to victims of violence. He also initiated some policies which underscored the use of reconciliation and nonviolent methods, though there are questions about how much progress has been made on the ground especially following the increasing use of government forces in recent months. What did the NRC report say? Among other things, Chapter IV contains the NRC' prognosis of the situation.

INTRODUCTION

Yangtze River Delta region, covers a total of sixteen cities, namely, Shanghai City, eight cities in Jiangsu Province (Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, Zhenjiang, Yangzhou, Taizhou and Nantong), and seven cities in Zhejiang Province (Hangzhou, Ningbo, Huzhou, Jiaxing, Shaoxing, Zhoushan and Taizhou). The region is located at the juncture zone of the Yangtze River and China's coastal regions with favourable natural condition and prominent locational advantages, which is the core of China's coastal and riverside “T”-shaped strategic axis region. The land has an area of 110,000 square kilometres, accounting for 1.1 per cent of the country, with 97 million resident population (about 6.3 per cent of the country) and 3.39 trillion regional GDP (about 18.6 per cent of the country) by the end of 2005. Moreover, the industrial scale, technology and brands of steel, petrochemicals, automobiles, and textiles and so on as well as urban development have obvious advantages in the country. Of the nation's economically strongest thirty-five cities, the Yangtze River Delta region accounts for ten; out of the nation's top hundred counties, the Yangtze River Delta region accounts for thirty-seven. More than 400 of the world's top 500 enterprises have settled in this region. Therefore, it can be said that Yangtze River Delta region is one of China's leading region with the fastest growth rate, highest degree of openness, superior investment environment and competitiveness. This region most likely will be the first Chinese region to be among the top regional economies in the world.

Rapid industrialization and urbanization lead to the region's tremendous changes in population, land use, as well as economic spatial structure and patterns. Globalization and localization have exerted the greatest impact on these spatial changes. However, taking into account the effects of globalization on regional development, scholars have called for the “globalizing” of regional development (Coe et al., 2004; Yeung 2005). Globalization and the dispersion of global capital have transformed core cities in developing countries into globalizing cities. They are often the most globalized places and the focus of foreign direct investment (FDI) in these countries, and more significantly, emerging nodes of the global economy (Wei and Leung 2005).

INTRODUCTION

For more than three decades, since Thailand' emergence from naked military dictatorship in the early 1970s, both academic and journalistic observers have tended to view its politics as a work in progress. Extreme cynics, some historians, and a few remaining crude “cultural” determinists have resisted this Whig view of Thai developments. But its appeal has otherwise proved strong and general. A resolve to craft some sort of stable, putatively modern and democratic, idealized political order numbered among the main influences on the drafters of Thailand' 1997 constitution. The subsequent, widespread hope that the constitution would undermine money politics and see to the emergence of a collection of independent oversight bodies testified even more directly to the appeal of the idea of progress in Thai politics. Thaksin Shinawatra put paid to that hope after becoming premier in 2001. Then, the evening of 19 September 2006 brought the dismal spectacle of a twenty first-century military seizure of state power in Bangkok and the abrogation of the 1997 constitution.

On one level, the conduct of the Thaksin government and the putsch that removed Thaksin from the political arena might each seem to vindicate the cynics, historians, and the crude culturalists in their scepticism about progress in Thai politics. On a more fundamental level, however, what defined that politics during the year preceding Thaksin' ouster was a contest between two visions of where political progress should lead. Far from deadening the appeal of such visions, the year confirmed their continued relevance. Likewise, the tanks that appeared on the streets of Bangkok on 19 September in no way ended that contest. It has resumed, and, not least now that the reign of King Bhumiphol has passed the sixty-two-year mark, there is every reason to believe that that contest will only intensify in the months and years ahead.

The 19 September 2006 putsch in Bangkok came at the end of a year of endlessly confusing turns, twists, advances, and reverses on the Thai political scene. Nevertheless, these developments came in three discernible phases: September 2005–February 2006, March June 2006, and July–September 2006. These distinct phases notwithstanding, a number of factors proved important throughout the entire period.

INTRODUCTION

With the success of the “miracle growth” of the East Asian Tigers by adopting openness or export-oriented strategies, several developing countries including China and India are also adopting the strategy of openness as part of their economic and industrial development. As part of the such strategy to attract multinational corporation investment, most countries develop special economic zones or export processing zones. In line with domestic industrial policy, countries have embarked on several regional economic cooperative arrangements to promote trade with neighbouring countries. The key idea of these regional economic arrangements is to increase the synergy within the region and to create greater economic spillovers. Multinationals could take advantage of different endowments of regional countries and create greater spillover in technologies and international networks. Several prominent examples of growth triangles include the IMS Growth Triangle (Singapore, the Malaysian state of Johor, and Batam Island in Riau, Indonesia) and the Pan Pearl River Economic Zone (including Guangdong Province of China, Hong Kong and Macau).

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) Economic Zone accounted for almost 10 per cent of China's GDP and more than a third of total trade in 2005. The rate of growth of GDP in the PRD is higher than the national growth rate. One of the objectives of this chapter is to identify the factors contributing to the sterling economic performance recorded in the PRD, and reflect on how the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle (IMS-GT), and in particular the Batam, Bintan, Karimun (BBK) SEZ, can possibly adopt some of the strategies and emulate. The Singapore, Indonesia, Johor (SIJORI) growth triangle and Pearl River Delta region will be discussed further in the later sections. The theoretical foundation for the formation of such regional zones will be explored in the next section.

REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT THEORIES

Researchers and scholars have propounded several theories of economic growth and development over the last few decades, the earliest of which is the Growth Pole Theory introduced by French scholar François Perroux (1950).

INTRODUCTION

There is much literature on Islamic education in the south. Most of it identifies a major disconnect between how Islamic schools are perceived by the state and by the Malay Muslim community. From the state' perspective, a number of assumptions inform their understanding of Islamic schools in the south: schools encourage separatism by perpetuating Malay culture in an insular and exclusivist manner; the system of education privileging religious over academic and vocational training does not prepare students for modern Thai society, thereby widening the gulf between Malay (communal) and Thai (national) identities; and, schools teach a radical brand of Islam that legitimizes violence against the state.

On the other hand, in the eyes of the local Malay-Muslim community, Islamic education is seen to be central to Malay-Muslim identity based on a historical narrative that speaks of the greatness and independence of the Patani kingdom. To them, the centrality of Islamic education is expressed in the institution of the pondok, the traditional Islamic school that remains a key institution in Malay communal life, and the prominence of the Malay language as the language of Islam.

Notwithstanding the significant gulf in perceptions enumerated above, the tendency in both perspectives is to view the Muslim community and Islamic education as a monolithic entity. In doing so, the literature that spawns from such perspectives paper over some major shifts and trends in Islamic education in the southern provinces that have important implications for how we understand the conflict in the south. This chapter aims to flesh out some of these shifts and trends, and suggest how they might inform our thinking of developments in the south in relation to questions of Malay-Muslim history and identity.

ISLAM, HISTORY, AND TRADITIONALISM

Historically, the Kingdom of Patani consisted of the area that today roughly coheres geographically to the provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat in southern Thailand, and was known between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as a Dar’ al Islam (abode of Islam). At the same time, Patani was also a flourishing centre of commerce and trade, where traders from Southeast Asia met and transacted with counterparts from elsewhere on the Asian continent as well as Europe.

Regional economic development in China has been undergoing a strategic transition from disequilibrium to coordination since 1978, the year the nation adopted the reform and opening-up policy. In the light of major changes that have taken place in the intervening years, following the nation's guidelines for regional development, the metamorphosis of relevant strategies and policies can be roughly divided into three periods: 1979–90, during which the economy developed in favour of the eastern region; 1991–98, when strategies were initiated to coordinate the economic development of the central and western region; and the post-1999 period, when strategies have come into full swing to coordinate the regional economic developments. In the Eighth Five-Year Plan published in March 1991, the Chinese government adopted coordinated regional development as a top national strategy. Afterwards, the government adopted a strategy in September 1999 to accelerate the development of western region, initiated another strategy in October 2003 to rejuvenate old industrial bases in the northeast, and issued a call in January 2004 to hasten the economic take-off of the central region, indicating that the decision to achieve equilibrium in regional economic development had entered a period of all-round implementation. From the perspectives of industrial agglomeration and relocation, this chapter takes a look at the trend of changes in China's regional economic development since the reform and opening-up.

DIVISION OF ECONOMIC REGIONS AND THEIR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

China is a large developing nation with a comparatively large economic disparity among its regions. In the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1981–85), which came underway shortly after the adoption of the reform and opening-up, the government followed the old tradition to divide the country into coastal and inland regions, reflecting the difference indevelopment. Based on this traditional dichotomy, and in light of different geographic location and regional economic development levels, the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1986–90) divided the nation into three economic regions — eastern, central and western regions — to provide the government with guideline to follow when determining economic development priorities and setting up a pecking order for resource allocation.

OVERVIEW

Thailand' military coup on the night of 19 September 2006 came as a surprise, and was greeted with resentment by some and with joy, relief, and hope by others. The former were afraid that the coup was just the beginning of yet another military intervention in Thai politics, a tradition that represents a bitter revival of events fifteen years before in the 1991 coup and bloody incident of May 1992. Representatives of this group ranged from a number of students and university lecturers who called themselves the “19 September Network against the Coup”, to a taxi driver who ran his car head-on into an army tank stationed at the Royal Plaza to show his discontent with the coup for destroying Thailand' democracy.

For educated people within this group, using the military coup as a means to restore democracy was simply indefensible. Low-income people (including taxi drivers), on the other hand, were benefiting greatly from a number of generous financial schemes emanating from the populist policies designed and implemented by Prime Minister Thaksin after he came to office in 2001. These schemes included universal healthcare, village investment funds, the People' Bank, and cheap loans. The departure of Thaksin from power has meant the loss of many of these benefits.

However, in mentioning this, I do not mean to argue that these low-income groups, particularly the rural masses, are the “victims” of Thaksin' populist policies, as most middle class and urban intellectuals have been fond of pointing out. On the contrary, the victim thesis overlooks the significant fact that the rural poor have persistently struggled throughout

Thai history to bring political pressure to bear on various governments. The populist policies of Thaksin are in part the result of this long and arduous struggle.

Against the background of military intervention in Thai politics, the recent coup is thus seen by this group as redemption for the army, which is now in a position to reclaim its former prominent role in Thai politics after a long hiatus. The picture will become clearer after 30 September 2007 when General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, chairman of the Council for National Security (CNS) and leader of both the coup and the former Council of Democratic Reform (CDR), retires from his army post. Meanwhile, General Sonthi has kept the Thai public guessing whether or not he will enter politics, and if so by what means.

BACKGROUND

Environmental considerations are assuming greater importance in the planning processes of an increasing number of governments around the world. One aspect of this increasing mainstreaming of environmental needs is the development of eco-cities that seeks to reduce the amount of resource inputs and keep waste outputs to a minimum.

There are presently many experiments and developments related to eco- cities. The Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, mooted by Singapore Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong when he met China's Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing in April 2007, is one such example. This chapter will highlight the key features of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city vis-à-vis other eco-cities in terms of the purpose, the framework of cooperation and distinctive characteristics of the project. The comparison will be made with two other well-known eco-cities in China, namely the Huangbaiyu village in Liaoning and the Dongtan project in Shanghai. The Masdar Eco-city in Abu Dhabi will also be mentioned as it purports to be the world's first carbon-neutral, car-free city to rely entirely on renewable energy.

This chapter will show that the purpose of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city project goes beyond a commercial undertaking to include strategic and political objectives. The project offers a platform where leaders, officials and businessmen from both sides can interact and get to know each other better. This would lay the basis for stronger political and economic ties. In terms of the framework of cooperation, the project comes under a supervisory mechanism that involves senior leaders and officials from both sides. This is to facilitate the progress of the project which in turn will add substance to bilateral relations. In terms of its key features, the Sino- Singapore Tianjin Eco-city is practical-oriented with realistic targets set. More importantly, and unlike other eco-cities, it is strong in its emphasis on the social considerations of an Eco-city project.

Over the past fourteen centuries the expansion of Islam has transformed societies all across Asia and Africa, producing a civilization of great complexity and internal diversity. Despite the demographic realities of the modern Muslim world, however, the academic study of Islam remains plagued by a resilient bias privileging the Middle East not only as “central” but also as normative. Such orientations to the study of Islamic civilization have had the unfortunate effect of implicitly reducing other regions (even those in large majority populations that have been Muslim for centuries) to the status of peripheries. While there are arguable cases to be made for the special position of the Arab world in particular — including the position of Arabic as a primary language of Islamic scripture and religious scholarship, as well as the importance of the pilgrimage to Mecca as a pillar of ritual observance — this can be and has been overstated. This persistence of what may be termed an “Arabist bias” has thus impaired understandings of the histories of Muslim societies outside the Middle East and produced distorted images of Islam in the contemporary world.

At the turn of the twenty-first century there are approximately 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide, with most of the major population centres located in Asia and the top five largest Muslim national populations located outside of the Arab Middle East.1 Today nearly 60 per cent of the Muslims living in the world do so in Asia. By comparison, the combined populations of all of the Arabic-speaking Muslim nations of the Middle East add up to less than 20 per cent of today's global umma. A demographer's visual mapping of today's Muslim populations on a geographic model would then place the “centre of gravity” of the Muslim world somewhere between Sukkur and Nawabshah along the banks of the Indus River.

Despite this, scholars focusing on studies of Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia continue to struggle against the inertia of dominant biases that relegate their investigations to the margins of Islamic Studies. Richard M. Eaton, among others, has earlier called attention to the imperatives that he saw implied by such a view of the Muslim world, stressing that “the question here is not whether South Asia can be considered as any sort of periphery, but rather how this region became a cultural and demographic epicentre for the entire Muslim world”.

A country in Southeast Asia: armed soldiers occupy Buddhist temple compounds protected by sandbags and barbed wire to protect themselves from insurgent attacks. The same security forces use sniffer dogs to search the homes and schools of local Muslims, well knowing that this is deeply offensive. Militants, some say inspired by perverted notions of the Islamic faith, behead victims, seemingly in emulation of so-called “jihadists” elsewhere. There appears to be some mercy though — the beheadings take place after death. Young men, suspected of insurgent activity are released from custody and “disappear”. The whispered talk of the town in the small tea-shops that populate the main strip is whether there will be “an attack tonight”. Welcome to the Malay-speaking “border provinces” of southern Thailand: Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, where since 2004, over 3,000 people have died in a murky conflict between Malay-Muslim insurgents, criminal networks, and security apparatuses of the Thai state. It feels, in many ways, like another country.

For many outsiders, including myself, the deep south of Thailand has largely been a peripheral concern; studying Thailand has meant studying Buddhist and nationalist Thailand. For the most part, my own work has been motivated by an interest in how nationalism and ideology bind fissiparous social formations. Integrative and almost religious in their combined power, national identity and nationalism (the weapon and the bullet) continue to confound expectations of a post-national age. Thailand seemed to be a good example of this. This interest has led me to pursuing an overly narrow interest in the “success” of Thai nationalism and its various expressions. Events in the south of Thailand, where some form of struggle for national recognition is underway, has brought home just how misplaced such an assumption regarding Thai nation-building can be. More than that, it has introduced to much of the world, including keen observers of Thailand and Thais themselves, a largely misfitting part of that nation-state (as it is currently constituted): the Muslim majority provinces of the deep south.

On my first visit to Pattani in October 2005 I pursued an interest I was then developing in Thailand' Ministry of Culture. I visited its provincial office on the fourth floor of the Sala Jangwat, the large building that brings together in one provincial location most of the offices of the Thai state.

INTRODUCTION

Located at the heart of Northeast Asia and along the coast of the West Pacific, the Bohai Rim comprises two municipalities and three provinces (Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Liaoning and Shandong). It covers 5.43 per cent of China's total area, and houses a population of 231.34 million, which accounts for 17.60 per cent of China's total population. In 2006, the Bohai Rim contributed 26.19 per cent of China's gross domestic product (GDP), 26.62 per cent of China's total profit and 21.85 per cent of China's total imports and exports. The Bohai Rim, together with Pearl River Delta (PRD) and Yangtze River Delta (YRD), forms China's three biggest industrial belts.

Benefiting from the ‘eastward moving’ trend of investments in the world and the ‘northward moving’ trend of development in China, the Bohai Rim has drawn the attention of the world in recent years. After the Binhai New Area of Tianjin was officially designated the experimental zone for comprehensive reform, Tianjin was defined by the State Council as the economic centre of North China and Beijing was delineated as “China's capital, metropolis, culturally well-known city and suitable city for residence”. These have brought new opportunities for economic cooperation in the area. The Bohai Rim is expected to become the third economic growth engine for China.

The Bohai Rim's regional economic development has great potential. But regional economic cooperation in the area is more like a “proposal”, far behind the regional economic integration process in the YRD and the PRD, although the concept of the ‘Bohai Rim Economic Circle’ was first suggested in the mid 1980s. 7 The lack of cooperation increased the development cost of the region and the traditional economic growth pattern has brought environmental crisis which is increasing severe restrictions on the economic development of the region.

THE OVERVIEW OF THE BOHAI RIM'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The Bohai Rim is an important base for both basic and high-tech industries in China. Its share of China's GDP has remained above 20 per cent since the 1950s (see Figure 9.1).