Why a Young Diplomat's Memos Are Part of Thailand's Comeback

Harapoon Prasuchai spends his workdays writing memos that almost nobody outside a government building will ever read. That paperwork is one small piece of how Thailand is trying to convince the rest of the world it's worth investing in again. An alumnus of the International Community School (ICS) Bangkok's class of 2017 who goes by Fei-Fei, Prasuchai now works in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of International Economics, the office that feeds the numbers and talking points that ambassadors and ministers carry into meetings with foreign investors and business leaders. He described the job to Students Incorporated co-hosts Premi and Rebecca, offering a street-level look at a national campaign most people only see in press releases.

A Country Rebranding Itself

Prasuchai joined the ministry at a pointed moment. "It's an exciting time to be part of the Thai government today," he told the students, tying it to a change at the top: "we just had a new government, new prime minister." That government, led by Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin since August 2023, built its foreign policy around what it branded "proactive economic diplomacy," a framework that pushed Thai ambassadors abroad to spend less time on ceremony and more on landing trade and investment, according to reporting from GIS Reports Online. Embassies were reoriented toward something closer to a sales function, with envoys briefed to act more like company representatives than traditional diplomats and tasked with lobbying for Thai businesses in international forums.

The urgency behind that pivot shows up in the growth numbers. Thailand's economy expanded at an average of just 1.9 percent a year over the decade through 2024, versus roughly 4.9 percent across ASEAN as a whole, a gap economists have pinned on political instability, stalled reforms, and a pandemic that gutted the tourism industry it depends on. Against that backdrop, Srettha's government set a target of drawing at least $15 billion in foreign direct investment over three years. Roughly 210 billion baht (about $5.7 billion) in committed investment from Chinese electric-vehicle makers alone was already flowing into Thailand's auto sector by mid-2024, Bangkok Post reported, part of a broader regional race to capture EV supply chains leaving China. Prasuchai's own framing matched that urgency almost exactly. "We're actually very eager to put ourselves back on the world map," he said, "basically telling the world like, okay, we're back on track."

What the Job Actually Looks Like

Ask most people what a diplomat does and they picture a state dinner. Prasuchai's account was closer to a research desk. "My main job would be to kind of synthesize, aggregate information from all over Thailand," he explained, "and bring the information to say, like, ambassadors or our political leaders to meet with foreign leaders." The goal is giving those leaders "a picture of how Thai economic knowledge is and what we're allowed to sell to the world" before sitting down with a foreign counterpart. In practice, that means a lot of writing in both Thai and English, a steady diet of news research, and meetings with "people who are doing actual work in business or in driving the digital economy," gathering material that eventually becomes a minister's talking points.

It is unglamorous work for a glamorous-sounding goal, and the country's tourism arm leaned on a similar pitch in 2024, with results that back up the strategy. The Tourism Authority of Thailand reported nearly 36 million foreign arrivals for the year, edging past its own 35-million target and generating more than 1.8 trillion baht in revenue, helped by visa exemptions extended to travelers from 93 countries. Neither the visa policy nor the tourism marketing campaign runs through Prasuchai's desk directly, but they are the visible, headline-grabbing cousins of the same "we're open for business" case his department builds memo by memo.

A Career Path That Ran Through Paris, Until It Didn't

Prasuchai's road to that desk started at ICS, where he singled out AP Environmental Science, taught by a teacher he called "an ICS legend," Dr. Steve, as the class that stuck with him, testing water samples from local canals in the class's first year on offer. From there he went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., studying international political economy and French, a program he described as demanding breadth across "a little bit about everything" (politics, history, economics) rather than deep expertise in any one thread. Living in Washington came with its own culture shock, he said, describing a city defined by ambient proximity to power: people casually mentioning they'd run into Joe Biden buying ice cream, or spotted Michelle Obama out jogging.

An exchange year in France was supposed to be part of that path, but instead became a lesson in how fast global plans can collapse. He was in Paris in the spring of 2020 when the school "just emailed me, say, you need to leave Paris, get out of there within 48 hours, or else your credits won't be transferred back" in time to graduate. He booked one of the last flights out. The disruption he described was not unusual: universities worldwide issued similar evacuation notices to students abroad in March 2020 as COVID-19 shut down international travel almost overnight. But it rerouted his plans back to Bangkok instead of toward further international postings, and into a Thai-language environment his years at an English-medium school had left him underprepared for. "My Thai got really bad," he admitted. "Coming back to Thailand, like having to write things in Thai, having to talk in Thai was a challenge."

Right before graduating, he had already interned at a Bangkok firm called Reason Partners. Once home, he returned to it full-time as a consultant, work he described as walking multinational clients through the Thai regulatory and political system: telling companies "what's right and what is what they should do, what they should say, or who they need to know about in the Thai government, so that they don't make any stupid mistakes." That kind of work is its own established industry in the region, handled by firms such as Vriens & Partners, BowerGroupAsia, and Asia Group Advisors, which advise multinationals on political risk and government relations. For Prasuchai, the internship became the on-ramp to doing that same relationship-building from inside the government instead of outside it.

The Mindset the Work Requires

Asked what advice he'd give students considering government work, Prasuchai didn't sell the prestige. He warned about the hours: diplomatic and civil-service work runs on national timelines, not personal ones, and "requires a lot of working outside of regular hours" because "it is going to happen regardless." Deadlines come from summits, elections, and crises, not a manageable calendar. What makes that bearable, he argued, is a specific mindset he traced back to ICS itself, where mandatory community-service hours had once struck him as busywork. "Looking back, I think it adds a lot of impact on me," he said, "because I think it's very important to think about what and who you are doing these things for."

That framing produced the interview's sharpest line, one that applies well past government work:

There's always an aspect of public service. If you don't have that in mind, then it's going to be tough.

It is advice aimed at future diplomats, but it doubles as a description of the job he already has. The pitch Thailand is making to the world right now (that it is investable, visitable, and back on track after the pandemic knocked its two biggest revenue engines flat) depends on a chain of unglamorous, mostly invisible labor: briefs written at odd hours, meetings logged, numbers double-checked before they reach an ambassador's mouth. Prasuchai is only a few years out of ICS and already several links into that chain, translating a national economic strategy into the paragraphs someone else will eventually deliver on a stage.

← Back to all posts