Introduction
When I was a child in Thailand in the 70s, our family often went from Bangkok to
visit our uncle who lived upcountry. Year after year, we heard that the village where
our uncle had a pig farm and paddyfields became more and more“developed.”
That meant that he had a better road to his house; he did not need to generate
electricity anymore as electricity poles came to every household in the village; he
had tap water instead of having to pump water from the irrigation canal to his home.
Later, I also learned that my country, Thailand, was called a developing country as
the infrastructure needed to be called“developed”had been clustered in the capital
city, Bangkok. Moreover, our GDP was so low. Thais who live under the poverty
line in 2009 were 8.1% of the population. That is about 5.6 million people who earn
at most US$ 1.25 a day (indexmundi.com). A friend said,“You should be happy
that they eulogize our status a bit. We are not underdeveloped. We are developing.”
Well, the terms“developed”was meant to be“material growth and how much
money you make.”According to the website whereisthailand.info, only 2% of the
population in Thailand has more than one million Baht and above savings in the
bank. Are these 2% of the population developed then? Ironically I witnessed
developed Thais who drive a Mercedes-Benz and litter on the street; people with
big cars park anywhere they please and obstruct the traffic; not to mention about
frauds and scandals created by rich Thais.
From the late 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s, I lived in the Netherlands and
Belgium. I observed the conflicts between the hosts (the Europeans) and migrant
workers from Turkey and Morocco. Being developed meant keeping the wealth
among white Caucasians? My following experience will illuminate more. During
2003 – 2007, I was in Australia, one of the richest countries in the world.“You need
to survivefinancially for thefirst two years because Australia is a developed
country; the cost of living is expensive”—that’s what we read in a leaflet advising
people about how to migrate to the country. When we were there, we saw pictures
in newspapers depicting aborigines who live faraway in the outback without
electricity, they had to go on foot to school, lacked tap water and lived in a
reservation area. It was a shock that we lived in a nice neighborhood with elec-
tricity, tap water, regular public transportation, internet and cable TV access, gas
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