Name: Why Thai students use rubber ducks, dinosaurs and three-finger salutes as protest symbols - ABC News
Brand: abc.net.au
SKU: abc-net-au-472
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Why Thai students use rubber ducks, dinosaurs and three-finger salutes as protest symbols - ABC News

preview

Why Thai students use rubber ducks, dinosaurs and three-finger salutes as protest symbolsShareAn accidental mascot has emerged from the latest Thai protests — the humble rubber duck.Thai social media was awash with images of large inflatable yellow ducks after they were brought along to last week. Initially, they were meant as a bit of a joke — a pool toy would be the only way to access the blocked-off Parliament, which sits on a riverbank in Bangkok.But when the water cannons came out, spewing fluid laced with blue dye, protesters quickly repurposed the ducks as shields."It's just cute, and it's a symbol against corruption," Aim Sinpeng, an expert in digital politics in South-East Asia at the University of Sydney, said.The rubber duck has a history of being used in political protest, having featured in the . It became a symbol of defiance in 2013 after giant ducks were photoshopped into the iconic "tank man" photograph from the Tiananmen Square massacre, resulting in the term "big yellow duck" being censored on Chinese social media platform Weibo. It's been used in protests in Brazil, too, where "paying the duck" means to pay for someone else's mistakes in Portuguese slang. The squeaky clean rubber duck has also been used as an anti-corruption symbol in Serbia and Russia.It's not just ducks — the protests have featured a range of pop cultural symbols, from the three-fingered salute from the dystopian Hunger Games novels, to singing the revolutionary "Do you hear the people sing?" from the musical Les Misérables. Protesters are , for military-backed Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha to step down, and for the monarchy to be reformed — . The protests have also included oversized T-Rex costumes, with the dinosaur image referring to an outdated way of thinking."What some of the Thai elites don't understand is the popular culture and the youth culture that underpins the resistance," Dr Sinpeng said. She said the protesting Thais grew up in a highly globalised world, so while the imagery wasn't chosen to appeal to Western audiences specifically, they often resonated with international observers.Kanyanatt Kalfagiannis, a Thai activist based in Australia, said protesters adopted pop culture from books and movies they had read.The 28-year-old, a leader of the Australian Alliance for Thai democracy, said young people related to the characters they grew up with. "We want ourselves to be as brave as them," she said."With the three-finger [salute], it might look stupid to others, but to us, it's something that makes us feel powerful."Protests have also featured Harry Potter dress-ups to make a point about "He Who Shall Not be Named". It's a thinly veiled reference to the Thai King. In Thailand, insulting the King comes at a heavy price and can see protesters jailed for up to 15 years under . Ms Kalfagiannis added there were other coded symbols, acronyms and Thai nicknames people used to refer to the King, while "clown" and "lapdog" were codenames for the Prime Minister.Thai street food vendors aren't immune from codenames, either. With protest locations often announced at the last minute to keep a step ahead of police, sellers have become adept at gathering intel to set up shop. They often arrive with food carts of fishballs before police and even before some protesters, earning them the nickname "CIA". Dr Sinpeng says it's partly the atmosphere of repression that has birthed the creativity in the protest movement. Thai people, she said, have grown up with censorship all their lives, and often resorted to using coded or subversive language. "The idea of using coded language and symbols is not new because of the censorship," she said. "It's like living in a pretty repressive environment, when it comes to freedom of speech."I think what's really different about this time is the audacity of the protesters, in talking directly about the monarchy and the kind of radical new demands they make."Thai politics used to be — royalist Yellow Shirts and pro-democracy Red Shirts. "We acknowledge the Red Shirts, we sympathise [with] them, but we are not the Red Shirts. We might stand, might fight for the same things, but we're still not the Red Shirts," Ms Kalfagiannis said. She said her generation was more discreet and creative."We grew up with the mentality that [you] don't do anything that would get yourself in trouble. But we want to express ourselves, so we need to express ourselves very discreetly," she said. Ms Kalfagiannis said Twitter had been a "safe haven" for protesters. Early on in the protests, activists even took to Twitter to crowd-source some hashtags and ideas. One of those ideas was a Japanese cartoon hamster, known as Hamtaro.Ms Kalfagiannis explains that the cartoon is as ubiquitous in Thai pop culture as SpongeBob SquarePants would be in Western countries. Everyone knew the cartoon's song and could easily adapt the lyrics to: "The most delicious food is the people's taxes" — a reference to alleged corruption. "This is not the first time the anti-government mass protest movements in Thailand have been facilitated by social media. But it's the first time that there is a deliberate attempt … to make the movement quite participatory and diffused," Dr Sinpeng said. "They didn't want it to be hierarchical, but to be grassroots and very, very open."In part, it's a matter of survival for the movement — she says the message is that anybody can be a leader, because if , others can step up. "In order to withstand repression, they need to make sure that leadership is replaceable," she said.23 Nov 202023 Nov 2020Mon 23 Nov 2020 at 8:33pmMore on:

Why Thai students use rubber ducks, dinosaurs and three-finger salutes as protest symbolsShareAn accidental mascot has emerged from the latest Thai protests — the humble rubber duck.Thai social media was awash with images of large inflatable yellow ducks after they were brought along to last week. Initially, they were meant as a bit of a joke — a pool toy would be the only way to access the blocked-off Parliament, which sits on a riverbank in Bangkok.But when the water cannons came out, spewing fluid laced with blue dye, protesters quickly repurposed the ducks as shields."It's just cute,...

public

Erin  Handley

Erin Handley

Official account of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, connecting you to the best content. Follows ABC accounts, lists trusted profiles.

Why Thai students use rubber ducks, dinosaurs and three-finger salutes as protest symbols - ABC News

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS