This essay examines the historiography of Chinese society in Thailand, focusing on the idea of “assimilation.” Post-WWII scholarship on the Chinese in Thailand has been strongly influenced by what Jennifer Cushman called the “Skinner ‛assimilation paradigm’.” G.W. Skinner, in his Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand (1958), predicted a rapid assimilation of the entire Chinese community; subsequent scholarship, negatively or positively, made its arguments by referring to this paradigm. However, many scholars have found ethnicity to be tenacious or ethnic identity to be arbitrary, and various Chinese factors and elements have come to be manifested more openly in Thai society in response to the (re)emergence of China as an economic and political power since the 1990s. In recent years, therefore, there has been a growing tendency to question this paradigm. By re-reading Skinner's various works written from as early as 1950, tracing relevant works done by other contemporary scholars in the same field, and placing them in historical and geo-political contexts, this essay explores why such emphasis was given to the idea of assimilation and how it persisted in subsequent years. It argues that assimilation was a response to “political” needs in the era of Cold War and emergent nationalism in Southeast Asia and that studies of overseas Chinese societies in Thailand and Southeast Asia were created as an integral part of the “area studies” strongly advocated in the U.S. since the 1950s.
