When the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand, HE Mr Anutin Charnvirakul, made a three-day official visit to Australia from 17th-20th August 2026, it provided an opportunity for Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to reflect on the history of good relations between the two countries dating back to the beginning of diplomatic relations in 1952, at the start of the Cold War.
Prior to 1952, as a British dominion, Australia’s foreign relations with Thailand had been managed by the British Foreign Office.
Not so for Thailand—or Siam, as it was known before 1939—which, alone in Southeast Asia and indeed in Australasia, did not submit to colonial rule. Indeed, Siam was one of a small group of ‘unconquered states’ in the world during the age of European imperialism, the subject of an excellent recent book by historians H.E. Chalabi and David Motadel. Our understanding of the history of these unconquered states has greatly improved in recent years, giving us better insight into the worldviews of their modern successor states, among them Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Japan, and of course, China.
The meeting between the Thai and Australian prime ministers resulted in the usual agreements we are familiar with on security, trade, and economic cooperation. It was not disclosed whether the subject of China was raised, but given China’s centrality to Australia’s security concerns today, it would be surprising if it wasn’t.
Thailand & China: Managing asymmetrical relations
Thailand’s long history of independence in the Indo-Pacific region, the sophistication of its foreign policy, and indeed, its proximity to and relations with, China over many centuries, offers some lessons that an Australia still uncertain of its place in the Indo-Pacific region might find of value.
Of all countries in the Indo-Pacific, arguably none has enjoyed a more beneficial historical relationship with China than Thailand.
Unlike Australia since British settlement, Thailand has not had a ‘great and powerful friend’ to manage its foreign relations in a complex region. Instead, it has a very long history of dealing, usually successfully, with more powerful external states.
Siam’s diplomatic relations arguably can be traced back to the turbulent thirteenth century, when Thai kings negotiated relations with China’s expansive new Mongol Yuan Dynasty, which had forced most of the kingdoms of Southeast Asia to submit.
Later, at another politically unstable period in the late sixteenth century, the Thai king Naresuan sent correspondence to the Ming Emperor in China offering military assistance in the fight against the Japanese military ruler Hideyoshi, whose forces had invaded Korea and threatened China, sparking the famous Imjin War. Naresuan promised to send a naval force to attack Japan from the rear. Some Chinese and Korean sources even claim that Siam had actually despatched troops to China.
Yet Siam’s relations with China historically, as now, tended to focus on trade. Siam was Southeast Asia’s most enthusiastic participant in China’s so-called ‘tributary system’—a political, economic, and cultural mechanism to manage the ‘asymmetrical’ relations between giant China and its smaller neighbours—a mechanism still poorly understood in the West. In reality, the system tended to offer greater benefits to the rulers of the Southeast Asian ‘tributary states’, who were eager to enrich themselves through the access they were granted to China’s vast market.
Trade with China had enabled Siam to rebuild its state and society after the disastrous collapse of the kingdom of Ayutthaya to Burmese forces in 1767. By the early nineteenth century China was Siam’s major trade partner, helping enrich its kings and nobility. Tens of thousands of Chinese migrants poured into the country to take advantage of the new economic opportunities that trade generated. By the end of the century perhaps half of the population of Bangkok, and many of Siam’s urban centres, was Chinese.
“The Great Disruption”
China’s defeat by the British in the first Opium War and its signing of the Treaty of Nanjing which forced China to accept European trade on European terms, was carefully studied by the Siamese government. When the British Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, suggested that Siam end its tributary relations with China and agree to a treaty with the British—modelled on the Treaty of Nanjing—Siam’s king Mongkut (of The King and I fame) invited Bowring to Bangkok in 1855 where the treaty was signed. Older histories mark this moment as the beginning of Siam’s ‘modernization’.
In reality, Siam moved out of the economic orbit of China and into the new orbit of the British Empire.
As China entered its ‘century of humiliation’, and Southeast Asia came under Dutch, British, and French colonial rule, remarkably, regular diplomatic relations between Siam and China were disrupted for the best part of a century.
The establishment of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 provided an opportunity for the renamed ‘Thailand’ to reestablish diplomatic relations with a newly unified China. A recent book of interviews with Tej Bunnag, former Permanent Secretary (and later Minister) of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to China (following in the footsteps of his grandfather), and Ambassador to the United States, revealed that Thailand had wanted to recognize the PRC soon after 1949, but Cold War considerations prevented it. Following Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, Thailand recognized the PRC in 1975 and normal diplomatic relations with China finally resumed.
Today, Thailand remains one of the United States’ two Treaty Allies in Southeast Asia – in effect a relic of the Cold War. But the inexorable forces of geography and economic gravity appear to have returned Thailand’s relationship with China to the much older precolonial pattern. While China’s preponderance in Thailand today is arguably greater than in Australia, we see little of the paranoia about China that we are familiar with in Australia in recent years. Partly this is due to a confidence grounded in eight centuries of relations with its giant northern neighbour.
