While researching the 1962 student massacre at Rangoon university for a recent podcast series, there were clear parallels between the atrocity and that of 1976 at Thammasat University in Bangkok. While both massacres were shocking, with death tolls over 100, the events were not entirely out of place in countries which had already seen decades of deadly political violence. In both cases, students were doubtless aware of the risks in taking to the streets that day, but they did nonetheless. The violence they were met with forced many into insurgencies, mostly those of the respective communist parties operating at the time. Decades later, and student leaders from both events are still prominent in today’s politics.
2020 saw another rise in Youth Politics in the region, perhaps the biggest since the supposed Cold War. Usually considered to have started in Hong Kong, a wave seemingly rose across Thailand, Burma and to a lesser extent Malaysia.
Typically, these kinds of Youth movements are fairly spontaneous, not directly affiliated with any specific political party and focused on a handful of specific issues which speak to a larger generational divide. In Thailand in 2020 it was centred on the reformation or repeal of Lese Majeste laws. In Malaysia the movement was known as Lawan and was centred on lowering the voting age, but largely triggered by the aftermath of the 1MDB scandal and management of COVID. In Burma, however, stakes were higher, as it was in response to the 2021 coup d’etat and reinstatement of military rule.
Four years later, we see the death of these Youth movements in Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia, while Burma’s moment developed into a mass insurgency– not unlike the aforementioned student movement of the past century. The question then becomes, why do these movements sometimes die quiet deaths and other times erupt into armed uprisings?
To take the case of Thailand and Malaysia. During the 2020 movement the protestors specifically identified themselves as Youth. Indeed, the main group leading the initial protests in Thailand were called Free Youth. Youth, however, is without question an unstable political demographic to base a movement on. By definition, youth is a finite concept limited by the inevitable march of time itself. The majority of those who took to the capital’s streets were aged 17-25, the same age that young people are expected to transition out of education and into selling their labour in the market economy, a pressure that exponentially increases year by year. It’s no surprise then that this pressure essentially puts a sell by date on Youth movements.
In these two cases too an outlet was offered, particularly in the case of Thailand. The transition from Youth activism to NGO’ism is a well trodden path. In Thailand the Move Forward Party latched onto the back of the street protests, and would soon offer positions to many activists both within their party and with the network of NGOs that surround it. For most activists this sublimates the need for messy dangerous actions in the street, because within the NGO sphere they can pursue change within the safe confines of air conditioned offices and conference rooms, while also earning a salary.
One particularly stark example of this is the Workers Union in Thailand (สหภาพคนทำงาน). Despite the name, the group was formed by professional Trotskyist activists and university students at the time of the 2020 protests. During the latest May Day march in 2024, instead of joining their comrades in the streets, Workers Union members held an internal conference at a central Bangkok hotel.
In Malaysia, much of the energy of the Lawan movement was again sublimated into NGO’ism and parliamentary politics. The party Malaysia MUDA (Malaysia Youth) was formed, a curious decision to seemingly attempt to integrate Youth politics into the parliamentary setting. To this day the party has been largely unsuccessful, winning just 1 seat in the nationwide elections. In both cases, time spent organising and marching on the streets was transitioned into untold hours of zoom calls and air conditioned conference room meetings.
Many of these Youth movements, appearing in urban centres from university campuses, were ultimately led by the children of the middle class and it showed. When talking to one Lawan organiser, they described MUDA’s rank and file as “middle class petty bourgeois conservatives and opportunists who aspire to be the country’s future elites”. As such, the protest movements became opportunistic vehicles for igniting or furthering the careers of those ambitious leaders. There were of course exceptions to this bourgeois leadership, particularly in Thailand in 2020, however, they were harshly clamped down on.
This issue is compounded when among what remains of radical organising in places like Thailand and Malaysia, there exists aged vanguardists, older generations of activists distrusting or unwilling to share their platform with political newcomers. For example, organisations in Thailand like Assembly of The Poor, The Four Regions Slum Network and The Northern Peasants Federation are in dire need of new blood, but lack the will or the capacity to allow it in.
Running contrary to this is, of course, Burma. Pre-coup, there was certainly no shortage of NGO jobs available in Burma. During the NGO boom years of 2011-2020, on many accounts, Yangon was the fastest growing NGO market in the world, so much so that many were afraid the city couldn’t handle the influx of cash. The coup, however, came amidst the COVID pandemic, with many international workers having already headed back to their home countries to wait it out. Immediately after the coup, it was clear that the NGOs would be targeted by the military, who had long seen them as their political enemy. This triggered an almost immediate exodus of domestic and international NGOs, mostly into neighbouring Thailand.
Meanwhile in the streets, during the first few weeks of the anti-coup protests, while there was a mass outpouring of young people, there were also huge strikes organised by labour unions and civil service workers. Despite the anti-junta movement often being painted as one of Youth, this was a far broader coalition than the concurrent cases mentioned above. The use of liverounds by the military led to a rapid escalation. Just a month after the coup, young activists were already going underground to procure arms and munitions– here they were aided by the ethnic-minority insurgencies that had been raging along the country’s borders for decades. In the following years, insurgent militia units have been established across the country, carrying out assassinations, robberies and even all out warfare against the military junta. The majority of these militia members are indeed the neglected Youth, be they working class labourers or middle class university students, they have been pushed so far as to finally take up arms against the state, just as those students in Rangoon of 1962 and Bangkok of 1976.
What we see in the case of Burma’s uprising is an alternative outlet to youth movements. In Thailand and Malaysia, no matter how brave or radical they were, there was no real option to go underground and take up arms, the clearest outlet for most of the Youth protesters was air conditioned NGO jobs.
Meanwhile in Burma, the NGO world was vanishing and the chance to head to the border region, where existing armed groups awaited them, was a real option that many took, again mirroring 62 and 76.
What we are saying then, in this piece, is that Youth movements have a clear sell-by-date. They can only last for but a few years before they need to be sublimated into a different kind of politics, be that the armchair politics of the NGO class, or full scale revolutionary insurgencies. This results in a cycle of Youth movements, which continually get recycled back into the NGO and parliamentary systems.
As such, until there is another political outlet for the politicised frustrations of young people, or until there is a political consciousness for them outside of simply “Youth” this trend will forever keep repeating.