Jeffrey Wasserstrom is chancellor's professor of history at University of California, Irvine and the author of The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, a short book about activists in and exiles from Thailand, Hong Kong and Myanmar that will be published in June by Columbia Global Reports.
Given how much the world has changed in the last decade, it's eerie how closely Thailand's recent actions toward sanctuary-seeking Uyghurs have paralleled those of 2015.
Some 300 members of the largely Muslim ethnic Uyghur community went to Thailand in 2014 to escape mistreatment by Chinese authorities in their homeland of Xinjiang, a territory in the northwestern corner of China. In July 2015, the Thai authorities sent 109 of them back to China. They did so even though Uyghurs and many human rights groups insisted that the Chinese government would treat them brutally. The action drew international condemnation.
Last month, in a move capable of triggering déjà vu, there was a replay of that scenario. This time, Thailand deported 40 Uyghurs to China, again garnering criticism from other countries, including the United States.
The U.S., Canada and other nations say they had offered to take the refugees in, according to news reports this week. But Thailand's deputy foreign minister said his country "could face retaliation from China" if it sent the Uyghurs to third countries instead.
There is overwhelming evidence, albeit disputed by the Chinese authorities, that Chinese President Xi Jinping's government has been engaged in a systematic campaign of persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities — deploying harsh measures that include the mass incarceration of citizens in a large network of extralegal detention camps. The U.S. State Department has classified China's persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities as genocide and crimes against humanity.
It is striking, in spite of important shifts in Thailand over the past decade, how deeply the similarities run between the situations in 2015 and 2025.
The Thai authorities then, as now, defended their action by saying it conformed to international law. They also insisted that they believed Beijing's assertion that the returnees would be treated fairly.
In 2015, the Thai government that approved the deportation was a newly ensconced one. The action was widely seen as a sign that the government of Thailand — a close ally of the U.S. during the Cold War — would continue to move closer to China, as deporting the Uyghurs was bowing to pressure from Beijing.
All of this applies to the situation today.
There are some political differences, though, in the context around the two episodes. In 2015, the government was run by a junta, and the person defending the deportation of Uyghurs was a military man who had seized power in a coup in May 2014.
The person defending the deportation of Uyghurs in 2025, by contrast, is Thailand's female prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra. She heads a political party that received a lot of votes in the last national election, in May 2023.
Prime Minister Shinawatra is not, however, from the Move Forward Party, which did best of all in the 2023 election. The head of Move Forward, Pita Limjaroenrat, was not allowed to become prime minister as leader of a reform-minded coalition as briefly seemed possible after the votes were tallied. Instead, he has been banned from politics for a decade, and Move Forward was forced to disband by a court determined to defend many aspects of the political status quo.
The new prime minister's Pheu Thai Party — founded by her billionaire father, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra — came in second in the election. She leads a coalition that, like the junta in power in 2015 did, enjoys royal support, and it includes parties tied to members of the old junta. The story of domestic politics is one of continuity as well as shifts.
Placing a pair of statements excerpted from Freedom House annual reports from the middle of the 2010s and the middle of the 2020s side by side can underscore this point neatly.
"Thailand's … status declined from Partly Free to Not Free due to the May military coup, whose leaders abolished the 2007 constitution and imposed severe restrictions on speech and assembly," the Freedom in the World 2015 report said.
"Thailand's status declined from Partly Free to Not Free because the leading opposition party was dissolved by the Constitutional court," according to the 2025 edition.
One specific continuing aspect is related to how the Thai authorities seek to silence outspoken critics or drive them into exile. The long-standing lèse-majesté laws, which criminalizes criticism of the monarchy, is still used to intimidate and punish activists, making a mockery of any notion that Thailand is a land where speech rights are protected.
Yet Thais have periodically pushed for greater freedoms. In a dramatic protest movement in 2020 and 2021, young people led demonstrations calling for the junta leader behind the 2014 coup to step down after more than half a decade in power; for reform and less arbitrary use of the lèse-majesté laws; and for social changes such as the legalization of same-sex marriage. Some veterans of the movement were elected to parliament with the Move Forward party in May 2023, but several have faced lèse-majesté charges in court already or have them hanging over their heads now. One widely admired figure from that struggle, human rights lawyer Arnon Nampa, was sentenced to four years in prison on such charges in September 2023.
At the height of the 2020-2021 protest movement, the biggest struggle of its kind in the country this century, it seemed as though Thailand might be poised to start a bold new chapter in its history. In the immediate wake of the 2023 election, this feeling was even stronger for a time.
Instead, headlines from the country during the last half-year illustrate that there have been some notable moves into novel terrain, but troubling old limitations on freedom continue and some disturbing patterns from the past recur.
On the side of change, earlier this year Thailand became the first Southeast Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. On the side of continuity, late last year, news came that Arnon Nampa had been convicted, while already incarcerated, of added lèse-majesté charges, so that his total combined sentences come to a staggering total of close to 20 years.
On the side of disturbing patterns from the past, there is the deportation of the Uyghurs. This is a sign that the new civilian government in Bangkok, like the junta that came before it, is willing to take familiar kinds of actions against not just domestic critics, but also those seeking safety from the government of the powerful, autocratic neighbor to the north, whose favor Thailand's ruling elite, in each of its recent configurations, has shown itself eager to court.
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