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Marshall Cavendish International - Tom Plate

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118 pages

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Going home is an iconic theme of literature and music that touches everyone's heart. Bur rarely has that journey looked more like an impossible dream than for Thaksin Shinawatra, the much loved and much hated former prime minister of Thailand. Expelled from the former Siam by a military coup in 2006, the cell-phone billionaire retreated to a dacha in Dubai to bide his time and plot his triumphant return.While in exile in Dubai, Thaksin tells his tale of triumph and betrayal to American journalist Tom Plate as well as his personal thoughts about poverty reduction, power politics, the future of democracy in Asia - and why he prefers to lose at golf. In this volume, Plate masterfully dissects the mogul who ran his country like a CEO until the tanks came to show who was boss.

Sujets

Histoire

Tailandia

Thailand

History of Asia

Thaïlande

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Publié par	Marshall Cavendish International
Date de parution	01 septembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789814382571
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

2011 Thomas Gordon Plate
Research by Yena Kim. Photographs by Tom Plate and the household of Thaksin Shinawatra. Author s photograph on dust jacket and page 251 courtesy of Hugh Ujihazy.
Project editor: Lee Mei Lin
Design by Bernard Go Kwang Meng. Cover illustration by P.K. Cheng.
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International
1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300, Fax: (65) 6285 4871. E-mail: genrefsales@sg.marshallcavendish.com .
Website: www.marshallcavendish.com/genref
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright owner for additional material used in this book. Any omissions will be subsequently corrected.
The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no events be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Other Marshall Cavendish Offices
Marshall Cavendish Ltd. PO Box 65829, London EC1P INY, UK Marshall Cavendish Corporation. 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown NY 10591-9001, USA Marshall Cavendish International (Thailand) Co Ltd. 253 Asoke, 12th Flr, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia.
Marshall Cavendish is a trademark of Times Publishing Limited
National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Plate, Tom.
Conversations with Thaksin : from exile to deliverance : Thailand s populist tycoon tells his story / Tom Plate. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2011.
p. cm. - (Giants of Asia)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-981-4382-57-1
1. Thaksin Chinnawat, 1949- - Interviews. 2. Thaksin Chinnawat, 1949- - Political and social views. 3. Ex-prime ministers - Thailand - Interviews. I. Title. II. Series: Giants of Asia.
DS578.32
959.3044092 - dc22 OCN742927619
Printed in Singapore by KWF Printing Pte Ltd
A Note on the Conversations
Most of the dialogue with Thaksin Shinawatra emerged from the setting of his suburban Dubai home-away-from-home in December 2010, and is put in that setting. There were four two-hour sessions-then a fifth at a restaurant in the Burj Khalifa needle skyscraper downtown. About a half a year later, also in Dubai, we had an informal update session, one over dinner. In between there were several email exchanges, a phone call or two, and one lengthy Skype session between my home office in Los Angeles and Thaksin s exile home in Emirates Hills, Dubai.
A transcribing note: in his enunciation of English, the former prime minister of Thailand understandably employs Thai-like grammatical constructions and staccato pronunciations that are not difficult to understand in person-but when transcribed exactly as spoken make it next to impossible to easily read. And so for the sake of clarity of meaning and ease of understanding, I have transcribed the conversations from a kind of Thai-literal English to a smoother normal-appearing universal English. To have not done would not only have made the conversations difficult for the reader to follow but would have served to mislead the reader about the clarity and structure of the former prime minister s thoughts. And on those rare instances when I was in doubt, I sought clarification.
Please also note that, given the laws of sovereign Thailand, the monarch is accorded special status under l se majest . These pointed laws are designed to provide the King and Queen protection from commentary that might be regarded as critical or disrespectful. Although this book has been, at least initially, published outside of Thailand, and thus is not technically subject to Thailand s laws, it is intended that the book will be available in Thailand, in perhaps English as well as Thai. It is not the author s intention or desire to flout these laws, as long as they remain in force, and so the subject matter has been approached appropriately. In this connection, it must be said that at no time did Thaksin Shinawatra express in any of these conversations with me anything other than respect for the King and the Queen, and any implication to the contrary is not a reflection of the reality of our exchanges or anything the former prime minister said or meant to say. However, due to the increasingly assertive degree of prosecution of l se majest , it seemed only prudent for publication and fair to the former prime minister, his sister Yingluck Shinawatra and his party to hold back certain turns of conversation until the prosecutorial climate changes, perhaps for a second edition.
Tom Plate
Beverly Hills, California September 2011

THANKING THOSE WHO HELPED MAKE THIS BOOK POSSIBLE
In a Giants of Asia format, nothing much can happen unless the subject of the study is willing to open up. And so experts about Thailand who have read earlier drafts of this book expressed the belief that here we have, finally, Thaksin Shinawatra at his most candid yet. For this, there really is no one else to thank except the former prime minister himself, who was unfailingly patient as this process unfolded, and helpful to the very end, not once asking to review a page or be tipped in advance as to what might appear.
Many thanks to researcher Yena Kim, a former ace student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who is now in transit to graduate professional school, where she will earn her master s degree in social work, and join ranks that include my brilliant and almost heroically dedicated wife Andrea in the worthy profession of American social work; she was the dogged fact-checker on this book, as she once was on my still-running syndicated political column. Immense gratitude, again, for the knowledgeable reading of My (Mimi) Lu, a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, who was the crack researcher on the two prior Giants books, and who now is a professional diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service. And thanks yet again to Anya (Zabolotnaya) Benton, a former teaching aide at UCLA.
Thanks especially to Bangkok resident Christopher Coles, the jet-set artist and critically acclaimed painter of the demi-world of Bangkok, in all its pathos and existential vitality; his knowledge of Thai politics is as deep as it is passionate. And hats off to two elegant but necessarily anonymous/mysterious gentlemen who cannot be named but whom you would be quite happy to meet: they both know Thailand inside and out.
Special thanks to Suranand Vejjajiva, the Bangkok-based media commentator and former Thailand government minister in the Thaksin years who in the selfless interest of history translated documents and newspaper accounts from the original Thai that helped us definitively re-construct the narrative of the 2006 coup in Bangkok (that portion of this book being the sole chapter that he worked on). Special thanks as well to Dr. Chiu Tsang, the president of Santa Monica College, often viewed (rightly in my view) as perhaps the best two-year college in the U.S.; it was his suggestion for a full chapter on Thaksin as sportsman, with an emphasis on his run as proprietor of the Manchester City football team. And many thanks to Erin Boone , bilingual in Japanese and English, a graduate of the University of Utah, and a gifted transcriber, who now has been the transcriber on all three Giants of Asia books.
And last but certainly not least, by any means: my talented colleagues and warm friends in Singapore, at the publishing house Marshall Cavendish, especially the go-getter Publisher and General Manager Chris Newson, who excels in both balancing the books as well as balancing author egos; and Violet Phoon and Mei Lin Lee, the latter being this book s text editor; both are gifted not only with excellent literary taste and consistently deft editorial judgment but, as importantly, that extra DNA of grounded common sense that provides vital ballast for works that are immediate and yet ones that we hope might endure. Both of these literary ladies are gems.
Finally, it has been fun and a tremendous privilege, in working this Giants of Asia series, to encounter some of Southeast Asia s legendary book distributors and sellers, among whom the witty Leslie Lim of Pansing and the elegant Kenny Chan of Kinokuniya/Singapore have become, from my perspective anyway, far more than merely extremely effective commercial colleagues.
To all my former students-both at the University of California, Los Angeles (1994-2008), and now to all my current ones at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (2010-???)-if you feel you gained something of value from taking a class (or two ... or three) with Prof Tom, imagine how good he feels about making a difference in your life: for this is the dream of every professor .
So, to you all, I say, thank you very much indeed for that honor and opportunity .
Contents
P REFACE
The Return of the Jedi
Going home: always the first thing on his mind
The Passion of the Thaksin
Thailand can t get rich if the poor stay poor
Rich Man, Poor Man
His own family was run like a rural mini-corporation
The Sporting Life
Not even his toughest critics would ever say he didn t know how to keep score
In the Line of Fire
How lucky can one marked man get?
How to Su