The Pop Culture Politics of the 2020 Thai Protests

Protesters occupy the Lat Phrao Intersection in Bangkok. Photo by Khaosod English.

Growing up in Singapore in the 2000s, I vividly remember watching Hamtaro after school. The Japanese cartoon franchise features the lives and adventures of a hamster, Hamtaro, and his friends who escape from their cages when their owners are away. The theme song is an adorable swing-like tune that starts with fast drumming and call-and-response lyrics in which a singer sings “It’s Hamtaro time!” and the chorus responds, “when we work together it’s much better.” 

Fast forward to July 2020 and watching the protest in Thailand on the news, I find myself feeling a bewildering mix of déjà vu and curiosity as I encounter the same tune with a slight difference. The song sounds as lively as the original—arguably livelier with the interjection of electronic flourishes and ornamentation. However, beneath the agreeable nature of the tune, the remixed lyrics betray a sinister intention. When set against the backdrop of the protest, the lyrics become a call to arms: “Come out, run, run, run Hamtaro… The most attractive thing is people’s tax.” People are likened to these oppressed hamsters and encouraged to air their grievances and reclaim their liberty.

Watching the video, I became intrigued by the effectiveness and rationale behind the use of popular culture icons to mobilize a political movement. Besides an adorable hamster and “#LetsRunHamtaro,” the Thai protest also features other beloved icons, including characters from Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, and other assorted items like milk tea and umbrellas through the paraphernalia used at protests and on their social media platforms. Disparate meanings and implications become repackaged, repurposed, and refracted through the prism of the issue at hand. What then, could possibly motivate protesters to use these diverse cultural fragments? 

First, we need to consider what this prism looks like. The timeline is roughly as follows: the Thai army orchestrated a coup in 2014 and established the National Council for Peace and Order (N.C.P.O.), a military government headed by General Prayut Chan-o-cha. Chan-o-cha suspended the constitution and granted the N.C.P.O. unchecked and unlimited power over Thailand. In the March 2019 election, Chan-o-cha was elected but faced many charges of fraud from political opponents. Despite this de jure democratic transition, Thailand de facto maintained a military dictatorship with one junta senator allegedly calling Thailand a “democratic dictatorship.”  

Following the election, the government increasingly encroached on democratic spaces. These infringements included an orchestrated constitutional disbandment of the pro-democracy Future Forward party in February 2020 on trumped-up financial violation charges, as well as the censorship of Voice TV, a media outlet publicizing the democratic protests.

The Thai establishment has attempted to stamp out individuality with the implementation of the compulsory song nak rien student haircut that is reminiscent of ultra-authoritarianism in states like North Korea. Additionally, Chan-o-cha himself introduced the Twelve Values into the school curriculum, ordering pupils to respect Thai tradition and the monarchy. These specific policies targeting youth attitudes explains why students have been at the heart of the 2020 protest. 

While the disbandment of the Future Forward party did trigger some demonstrations, the subsequent COVID-19 lockdown on March 26th stifled the fledgling protest movement. Instead, dissatisfaction continued to stew for months until the protest resumed in mid-July, without any specific proximate cause.  As the student activist Free Youth Movement organized themselves into a coherent group using popular icons, calls for reform grew louder with the movement reaching twenty provinces by July 18th. 

The Free Youth have a tripartite objective as delineated in their 10-point manifesto:

1. A dissolution of the current government;

2. An amendment to the constitution, with the specific demand to repeal the lèse-majesté law that punishes criticism of the monarchy with up to 15 years in prison, and the Cybersecurity Law that affords the government a blank cheque to collect digital data; and

3. An end to the harassment of critics more broadly.

While the government’s policies may explain the accretion of discontent, they do not explain the specific timing of the outbreak of the 2020 protest. In other words, the outbreak of the protest in July 2020 was not precipitated by a particular oppressive law or policy. Alternatively, dissatisfaction was harbored but not expressed because of a collective action problem and the lack of an active protest movement at the time. People may have felt an immense amount of resentment towards the Thai establishment but were unable to identify their specific grievances with the skeleton of a movement during lockdown. 

In this light, protest leaders are first and foremost social entrepreneurs. They attempt to overcome this collective action problem by initiating a movement that spins together a rich narrative that encompasses as many peoples’ grievances as possible. They have a keen understanding of the range of people’s negative sentiments and can channel these sentiments into a coherent movement by using icons and symbols as a means to recruit and achieve group solidarity. The government’s policies are like timber, with each new injustice incrementally adding fuel. Protest leaders are the matches that transform passive sentiment into an active burning feeling, with symbols and iconography acting as additional oxygen that sustain the movement. 

Iconography is a form of social capital that represents ideas. On a basic level, the protesters dress up in Hogwarts robes because they are trying to evoke the sentimental value of the franchise. Similar to how the Hogwarts faculty and students protected the wizarding world from the Death Eaters at the Battle of Hogwarts, the Thai students see themselves as defenders of Thai democracy, using their chopstick wands to cast fake spells against authoritarian rule. As a beloved icon worldwide, Harry Potter has ubiquitous clout, allowing the protesters to swiftly gain the world’s attention. 

By dressing up as Hogwarts students, the protesters are also sending a political message.  The protesters can be interpreted as trying to mimic the bravery of Dumbledore’s Army and liken Chan-o-cha and his administration to the vileness of Voldemort and the Death Eaters—both of whom desire to establish an exclusive and rigid autocracy in Thailand and the Harry Potter universe. The ambiguity of this allusion is the symbol’s strength; all onlookers are affected by the symbol’s deployment despite their differing interpretations. Hence, regardless of one’s specific gripe about the Thai establishment, one could equally be mobilized and marshaled by the use of the symbol.

Symbols also allow for group formation, coherence, and solidarity. Emile Durkheim theorized that crowds are creative generative centers for symbolic connections that keep protesters invigorated. In contrast, lone individuals quickly become depleted and lose motivation due to their sense of alienation from their communities. Symbols, therefore, have the crucial effect of siphoning and directing feelings of discontent into a coherent enterprise. Besides using new symbols like the Harry Potter frocks, the protesters also evoke past symbols like the three-fingered Hunger Games salute, which first emerged at the 2014 anti-coup protests. In the Hunger Games franchise, the salute is used by the “tributes,” who would march through the streets towards their almost certain death in the games. The salute is a symbol of teary appreciation, farewell, and pride: the tributes’ last chance to see and thank their loved ones.

In the context of the 2014 protests, the salute was a powerful collective representation of the struggle for recognition and democracy that distilled and condensed multiple threads of feelings of discontent amongst members who might otherwise lack cohesion and focus. Collective identity is therefore both a signifier of and is signified by symbols. This mutual signification process iteratively strengthens the connection between identity and symbol. Since 2014, the salute has come to symbolize a diverse number of grievances: the growing wealth and privilege disparity between the military, political elite, and the Thai masses, the gross abuse of power and circumvention of any form of democratic checks and balances by the villainous incumbent, and the reduction of the Thai masses’ suffering to sadistic forms of entertainment for the elite. 

These iterations built up the salute as a robust symbol of Thai anger that both constructs the enemy (the Thai establishment), and is a form of communication and signal for social exchange amongst the Thai masses. The invocation of the symbol in 2020 thus has the dual effect of inciting similar unresolved feelings of discontent from the 2014 protests and furnishing the 2020 protest with a sense of continuity that was useful in expanding the protest core from students to the general Thai public.

These symbols also fuel fear and anxiety into productive emotions like anger and outrage. Protests are distinct sites for the creation and reinforcement of emotions in contrast to those borne from existing moral frameworks. For example, the disappearance of activist-in-exile Wanchalearm Satsaksit, who was last seen in Phnom Penh in early June, may not have immediately triggered the protest. However, once the protest reached a critical mass, the disappearance of Wanchalearm was recast through the specific moral and emotional framework of the protest. 

While rallying the crowd in early August, Thatchapong Kaedam, a prominent protest leader, reminded “everyone to think of Wanchalearm’s smile,” before beckoning at the masses to “cast” the Patronus charm that would protect themselves and the realm. Thatchapong also encouraged the protesters to link the disappearance of Wachalearm to “the smiles of our friends who have been forced into exile overseas,” and to “think of the smiles of our friends who think differently and are forced into becoming people to overthrow Lord Voldemort. Think of our friends’ different ideas, the smiles of our friends who were abducted and disappeared because they think differently, and point your wand into the sky.”

Kaedam’s tribute to Wanchalearm had a strong mobilizing effect for the movement. First, his speech focused peripheral and latent emotions into active ones. Second, the words amplified these emotions by coaxing the listener to attach their personal experiences of unfairness to the mistreatment of a public figure. Third, the connection to Harry Potter transformed negative feelings of fear or sadness into feelings of righteous vengeance and anger by attaching the emotions to the pop culture reference of Voldemort. This total metamorphosis would not have been possible without the emotional framework of the protest. 

Other cultural icons, such as milk tea and umbrellas, hint at the internationalization of the protest. The “Milk Tea Alliance” started off as a memetic, predominantly Twitter-based phenomenon that was a symbol of the metaphorical brotherhood between Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. All cultures have some kind of milk tea drink; the Hong Kongers have góngsīk náaihchà, the Thais have cha yen, and the Taiwanese, of course, have bubble tea (the famous Gong Cha chain around Columbia’s campus and New York in general is Taiwanese). 

Just as how the Harry Potter and Hunger Games symbols were crucial in reigniting the protests, the deployment of cross-cultural ones, such as milk tea, were key in the internationalization of them. Overseas, foreign allies are reminded of the similarities between the Thais’ plight and their own, triggering outrage over perceived domination and mobilizing action. While these symbols have a generalizing effect by underscoring the similarities of oppression between polities, they also have a particularizing one. Just like myself, international onlookers find the deployment of Harry Potter, Hamtaro, and the Hunger Games symbols intriguing; these references subsequently prompt a global interest into the circumstances of the Thai protest. 

More specifically, the “Milk Tea Alliance” was created in April 2020 after Thai model Weeraya Sukaram (@nnevvy) and her partner were attacked on social media for suggesting that Hong Kong and Taiwan are not a part of China. 

Ironically, Chinese nationalists would circumvent the Great Firewall to voice support for the Chinese Communist Party’s narratives on Facebook and Twitter. The media war with the #MilkTeaAlliance gradually expanded into an anti-domination movement, incorporating other countries; India, for example, was added following the May 2020 skirmishes along the Sino-Indian border, bringing masala chai to the alliance. 

By deploying the alliance in the 2020 protest, the Thai protesters evoke both international support for their self-governance and also a sense of reciprocity after key Thai figures supported other democratic causes. Other icons, such as umbrella formations and the Bruce Lee-inspired #BeWater philosophy flash mobs, also hint at both practical lessons learned from the Hong Kong protests and a sense of symbolic unity against ruthless authoritarian leaders. 

This move was very effective. Prominent foreign protest leaders, such as Joshua Wong, have advocated for the Thais’ cause over social media and in-person demonstrations using the #MilkTeaAlliance. Joshua rallied for the Thais as early as July 19th, when he urgently tweeted for Hongkies to “never forget how our Thai fellows stood with us against China’s nationalist trolls,” perhaps referring to nnevvy’s tweet and the social media feud that ensued in which the Thais, Taiwanese, and Hongkies jointly stood up to the mainland Chinese. 

The opposition to the protests have also adopted their own political symbols. Since August 2020, Royalists who have their own infamous symbol of the yellow shirt have launched a counter-protest, defending Chan-o-cha’s government and characterizing the protesters as rabble-rousing, intransigent youths.  Chan-o-cha’s government also reacted to the Free Youth in a textbook authoritarian fashion: enacting an emergency decree banning large-scale gatherings in Bangkok. Chan-o-cha attempted to cool tensions by promising to repeal emergency laws on October 21, 2020 “if rallies stay peaceful.” It is unclear, however, if this is a political ploy. After all, the standard of what is considered “peaceful” is highly arbitrary. 

Chan-o-cha’s conciliation attempt may be too little too late. The Free Youth have stepped up their demands in reaction to his emergency decree, rejecting his olive branch and vociferating now for his immediate resignation after he failed to meet the three-day deadline. From Venezuela to Hong Kong, authoritarian governments have repeatedly jettisoned considerations of social movements’ highly emotional roots. Steeped in a rich tapestry of cultural icons, these movements invoke tsunamis of context-specific emotions that build insurmountable camaraderie between protesters and onlookers. By attempting to bulldoze these movements using brute force, authoritarian governments shoot themselves in the foot by reinforcing the means of collective action. 

Bernadette Gostelow is a staff writer at CPR and a senior in the School of General Studies majoring in Political Science. She’s passionate about Southeast Asian politics and is currently writing her senior thesis on the relationship between terrorism and finance in the region. If she returns to NYC next semester, you can catch her shirking her work and looking for the best eateries in the city. Connect with her at bpg2126@columbia.edu about anything from the latest Netflix show you’ve been watching to your views on U.S.-China relations.