From all this you might conclude that Somchai is the type who spends his days on street corners asking male tourists in a whisper if they want a girl; not so. He is a successful businessman of Chinese extraction who owns some (legal) language schools as well as shares in an illegal casino, and regularly pays bribes to the police in relation to both businesses. He calls it ”the system” and looks at me with disdain when I express sympathy for his plight. Somchai, you see, pays almost no taxes, gets work permits for his English teachers without difficulty, and makes a nice fat profit from his casino interest. The way he sees it, the Thai system is more efficient than ours: no expensive army of bureaucrats to cast a shadow between investment and profit. Police bribes amount to less than 10 percent of his income. How much tax would he pay in a Western country? Thirty, 40, 50 percent?
For Somchai, the Chuwit case is an example of the system regulating itself with precision. Sure, Mr. Chuwit should not have knocked down Sukhumvit Square: dozens of small businesses lost everything, prostitutes were forced to walk the streets, people lost faith. On the other hand, the police should not have arrested Mr. Chuwit, not after he had paid his dues so conscientiously. So now the system is punishing both. In the fullness of time the police will probably whack Mr. Chuwit, whose posthumous hit men will whack some senior officials and when it has all blown over things will be back to normal.

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