A year of shocks, but Thailand endures

The year 2025 is not just your typical annus horribilis.

- Kavi Chongkittavorn

Some may say that an appropriate term to describe the year is "hell on earth," or narok bon din in Thai, when many bad things happen all at once.Yet Thailand managed to survive. In retrospect, we might consider Lord Buddha, who offers a playbook for surviving in crisis mode. Patience helped us muddle through this arduous time. Like the Tom Yum Kung financial crisis of 1997, the country experienced every flavour at once — sweet moments of survival, sour disappointments, sharp confrontations, and lingering uncertainty.

Meanwhile, critics, both at home and abroad, have often asked how Thailand managed to survive repeated shocks while tolerating political nincompoops.

The answer lies in the country's long history and deep-rooted instinct. The history of Thailand, once formally known as Siam, has always been a tale of resilient people who know how to adapt, improvise or weather storms. In 2025, however, the genie came out of the bottle, unleashing pressures and chaos.

The first month of 2025 began with what first appeared to be an isolated crime — the kidnapping of a Chinese film actor, Wang Xing. He was abducted after arriving at Suvarnabhumi airport and trafficked across the western border of Thailand to Myawaddy, Myanmar's scam centre. Few paid attention until Chinese netizens broke the news of his disappearance. Since then, the case has exposed an extraordinary scale of transnational crime operating across the region.

It also revealed how Thailand had become a crucial transit point and financial platform for criminal networks moving people and money out of the country. Their main destinations — Cambodia and Myanmar — were where casinos and scam centres had flourished. A few hundred thousand people were believed to be working in scam centres in the two countries, turning the area into one of the world's largest hubs for such illegal activity.