Features

Seeing the market through the spectre

Published

5 years ago

2021/09/21

By Panduka Karunanayake

Leftist ideologues like to create an image of ‘the market’ as a terrible place, like how grown-ups frighten children with their ghost stories. The market is portrayed as a ruthless, heartless machine that thrives on unfairness and corruption, crushing the poor and fattening the rich. It must have become easier to create this image after the Soviet bloc fell in the 1990s and China emerged out of communism soon afterwards, because after that people quickly forgot that socialist and communist economies too have markets – even markets every bit as ruthless, heartless, unfair and corrupt as any capitalist market. Today, these ideologues can write as if the market and capitalism are synonyms. Everything ‘un-socialist’ can be easily ‘explained away’ by saying that it ‘promotes marketisation’.

No amount of argument or explanation would change these ideologues’ minds – after all, an ideologue is a person who pursues an ideology in an inflexible manner. But let me set out some related matters, for the benefit of the rest of us.

Emergence and evolution of the market

Markets have probably existed throughout human existence, because human beings are social animals that thrive on social interaction. There is an illuminating passage in Charles Darwin’s book The Voyage of the Beagle, where he described an encounter with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in South America, who were ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherers and nomads with no previous encounter with civilisation:

“Some of the Feugians plainly showed that they had a fair notion of barter. I gave one man a large nail (a most valuable present) without making any signs for a return; but he immediately picked out two fish, and handed them up on the point of his spear. If any present was designed for one canoe, and it fell near another, it was invariably given to the right owner.”

This passage shows that they were well-versed in the moral principles – such as free choice, trust, fairness and reciprocity – associated with exchange of goods and services that form the basis of the functioning market.

The market became prominent after the emergence of agriculture about 10,000 year ago. Agriculture enabled farmers to produce a food surplus, which then enabled the rest of the villagers to work on other crafts – promoting division of labour and specialisation. This created an overall increase in the quality of the villagers’ lives, because they now had a wider variety of produce to consume. Villagers now depended on each other more, for the produce they wished to consume. As the village increased in size and complexity, a place where producers and consumers could meet, to exchange goods and services, became a necessity. In the physical realm this was the marketplace, and in the conceptual realm it was the market. Initially, exchange occurred through the barter system without a medium of exchange, but the invention of money made it easier.

But until industrialisation, this market was small and sluggish. It produced very little, compared to today. Most of what a village produced was consumed within it, and only a tiny proportion of it left the village, to be consumed by outsiders – the market was still not much more than the marketplace.

Reason for smallness

The reason for this smallness was not entirely because there were no industrial factories. The villagers could have produced more if they wanted to, but they didn’t, because they saw that any extra produce created problems. There were difficulties with storing it, protecting it, preserving it or transporting it elswhere, and in any event the lords could easily expropriate it under the feudalistic modes of production. Items that were considered luxury items were an exception; they were carried to distant destinations by camel, caravan or boat.

But starting in the eighteenth century, industrialisation changed all that. Factories produced large quantities of produce (or ‘commodities’) cheaply, and the market expanded to distribute a much larger variety and quantity of goods much more widely. Specialisation became the norm and a necessity. The crucial factor that made all this possible was probably the improvement in transport. Look at your lunch plate today, and try to figure out from where and how far each of the food items on it – not to mention the plate itself or the energy for the fire that cooked your lunch – have come from.

Today, production and consumption are almost totally separated from each other (with a few exceptions, like farmers who sell their produce by the roadside in front of their homes, and ‘factory outlets’). It is the market that enables this to happen. The market, which is no longer simply the marketplace, gives us access to a bewildering variety of goods and services, thereby enabling us – even the poorest amongst us – to enjoy a greater choice and higher quality of life, compared to pre-industrial times. The healthcare and education that even the poorest amongst us enjoy would not reach them if not for the market.

As an example, let us take soap. Until industrialisation this was a luxury item that only the elite enjoyed. In Roman times, even the elite cleaned themselves mostly by simply immersing themselves in their baths and rubbing off dirt; indeed, using soap would have made the bath too disgusting to get into. Soap was available only to those in the very highest echelons of society. The masses were ‘dirty’ and their skin was infested with scabies, pediculosis and lice, and they commonly suffered diseases like impetigo and erysipelas – they lacked even the water necessary to wash themselves (especially hot water in cold climates). But today, soap is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted – it was industrialisation that enabled its cheap mass production and the market that enabled its wide distribution.

Value of simple things

The real value of something as simple as soap was driven home powerfully to me in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, when people had lost everything and were accommodated in make-shift camps. What did they ask for, from the donors and volunteers who went to help them? First, they asked for food, water and certain medicines. A few days later, they began asking for soap, a change of clothing and sanitary pads: after three or four days, they were itching and suffering with fungal skin infections. That was an unfortunate re-enactment and reminder of the pre-industrial life of the masses. I remembered how a textbook of public health that I had read a few decades earlier had cleverly classified infectious diseases according to whether they were prevented by soap and water, clean drinking water, safe food, and so on. The post-tsunami experience showed me the sagacity of that – and the value of the ubiquitous soap, industrialisation and the market.

In his book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler compared a modern-day market to an efficient telephone exchange or switchboard. A switchboard connects thousands of senders and recipients accurately and enables messages to be sent across to their intended destinations – like producers, consumers, and goods and services in the market. Like telephone messages, goods and services are produced, sent across and consumed according to need and availability: demand and supply.

Such a market cannot exist on its own. It needs inputs from important sectors in society, such as law and order (which upholds the right to private property, prevents or punishes theft, and arbitrates when there are contractual disagreements), education (which creates an educated and trained workforce, not only for manufacture but also for distribution), communication, energy, transport, ports, etc. Such external supports have existed not only in capitalist markets but also in pre-capitalist and socialist markets. These supports are provided because everybody realises that markets are useful to everyone, especially when the population expands and the demand for commodities increases.

So, to say that something should be abhorred because it promotes ‘marketisation’ is disingenuous.

Organising the market

Markets can be organised in various ways. It helps to think of these as lying on a spectrum ranging from capitalism to communism, which are the extreme forms at the two ends. In-between, there are lots of compromises, combinations or ‘middle ways’. For instance, the current Chineses model is sometimes called state capitalism – a good example of a middle way.

But the natural form of the market that emerged spontaneously was the free market: a market where no authority-imposed restrictions or controls, nor introduced any encouragements or inducements. The activities in the free market merely recognised the concepts of private property and voluntary exchange, and operated on demand and supply. That was all.

Opponents

Throughout this time, the free market has had many opponents who have tried to impose limits or controls to it. Division of labour and specialisation were resisted – by the cultural elite who tried to maintain the status quo in society, such as the caste system in ancient society and feudal-peasant relations in medieval times. During industrialisation when factories came up, that was resisted too – by guildsmen who felt that their business was threatened, and those like the Luddites who felt threatened by the new manufacturing technology. Karl Marx proposed that private property, including ‘the means of production’, should be taken over by the state and brought under its control.

Some of the concepts that they used against the growth of the free market were traditional values such as loyalty and caste-based duties (especially upheld by the cultural elite), simplicity in life and charity as well as opposition to ‘ursury’ and banks (especially the clergy), and equality. It is only now, after centuries of change, that words like ‘industry’ (which initially meant industriousness), ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘individualism’ have emerged as ‘good words’, to create an environment conducive to a free market. Charles Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit nicely captured the mood of the era when industrialisation was struggling to emerge through the feudal society, by portraying the struggle of a typical ‘upstart’ who had to go to America to make a fresh start.

According to Stephen Fry, even today, the typical British comedy mostly parodies the upstart’s ineptness (“celebrate failure”), whereas the typical American comedy glorifies the industrious entrepreneur or smart-aleck (“life is improvable”). When we read comments about the market, we must take care to ‘read’ this subtext too.

Inequality

Ironically, inequality had previously been tolerated and even celebrated, as long as the only inequality was between the elite and the masses – the masses were ‘equal’ in their poverty and the elite were rich by birthright. But after industrialisation, the moment the masses gradually became enriched and a middle class emerged, inequality became a big social issue. When a part of the masses remained poor and another part became better-off, socialism was born. Different segments of the masses quickly became each other’s enemies – thanks to socialism. It was an example of applying the brakes even before the vehicle had started to move in earnest. They were ennobled by socialism’s new words, like ‘fraternity’ and ‘equality’ – which basically meant, ‘Those who are not poor like you are not one of you, and have no right to be rich if you too cannot be rich’.

But while the leaders of socialism may have harboured such beliefs, their proletariat comrades had simpler minds. In his book The Road to Wigan Pier written after World War One, George Orwell, himself a socialist, reflecting on the tensions and contradictions in English society as it grappled with this new-found inequality and ‘class struggle’, wrote:

“To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about….[No] genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency….His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring round the same things as at present – family life, the pub, football, and local politics.”

Orwell’s main message was that any effort to ‘improve’ society, by whatever name, that had lost touch with the common man was bound to deteriorate into a fascism. The remainder of the twentieth century proved him right.

Today, Orwell’s England has come through quite nicely in spite of the disintegration of the British Empire soon afterwards, and shows none of the class struggle and poverty Orwell’s and Dickens’ books have recorded. So, should we champion an equality of the poor, or should we patiently work towards a gradually enriching society with a tolerable level of inequality?

Necessary controls

At the same time, it is also advisable to control some forms of exchange in the market. For instance, if a country considers that it is necessary to ensure food security through its own, local cultivation of important crops, it is wise to put in place some safeguards to protect local agriculture from the adverse effects of competition from imported foods, at least for important foods. Even advanced capitalist countries like USA and Japan do this (for wheat and rice, respectively).

Similarly, it would be prudent to protect certain crucial markets, such as the energy sector and ports. It is also important to ensure distribution of crucial goods & services (such as healthcare, basic education, basic housing, basic clothing, basic transport) for all members of society, with a view to protecting the poor who have limited purchasing power. This requires the institution of safety nets and price control. In this age of climate change, resource depletion and environmental degradation, nobody would argue against environmental protection, which naturally requires the imposition of certain restrictions on the free market. Finally, nobody would argue that sectors such as national defence and law & order should be floated in the free market. So markets do need judicious controls and regulation.

More than ‘free’

On the flip side, in some markets there are mechanisms created specifically to encourage a bigger flow of goods & services than what the natural, ‘free’ market would sustain. These include patent laws, laws restricting monopolies, bankruptcy laws, the financial and share market, and so on; some of them may be good, while others are not.

The market is then not merely a place of exchange; it is also a place to make massive profits, where the falling crumbs accumulate to produce huge volumes of ‘wealth’. There are those who would profit exactly from this, while such ‘wealth generation’ or ‘productivity’ brings no intrinsic value to society while needlessly destroying our environment and culture – this can then become the new status quo that these new elite wish to protect.

Conclusion

A free market would promote exchange of goods & services and increase the volume of exchange, and this in turn would increase employment, productivity, taxation and funds for welfare expenditure. Both restricting it and encouraging it, while sometimes necessary, must be done only cautiously. Naturally, therefore, both extremes – and their supportive ideologies – are not good. What we need to have is a ‘middle-way’ market that enables enough economic activity and protects the poor, while protecting the environment for future generations.

So, there is no need to fear the market. What we need to do is understand it, be able to predict its behaviour, and try to modify it so that it creates the benefits we need and avoids harm. The child must grow up, overcome the fear of ghosts and learn to deal with darkness. Disingenuous, sleight-of-hand arguments that promote the darkness are of no use, and their supportive ideologies can only lead to fascism – as the twentieth century amply taught us.

The writer teaches medicine in the University of Colombo (email:

panduka@clinmed.cmb.ac.lk). He acknowledges helpful comments from Professor Sirimal Abeyratne (Professor of Economics, University of Colombo) and Dr G. Usvatte-aratchi.

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Features

Eastern University and the making of a culture of peace

Published

17 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

There is an important change in the way peace is being understood in Sri Lanka. The notion that peacebuilding is not simply the responsibility of governments, politicians and peace organisations, but is also a responsibility of educational institutions, appears to be permeating the consciousness of at least a section of the academic community. This was visible on International Peace Day at an event held at Eastern University by the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences. The event was unusual not least because the medical and nursing faculty of the university had decided that peacebuilding was relevant to its academic and professional responsibilities.

Peacebuilding has too often been treated as something undertaken after conflict, when the fighting has stopped and the immediate task is to rebuild relationships between communities. But peace cannot be sustained by governments and peace organisations alone. If it is to become long lasting, the values and practices of peace have to become part of the institutions through which a society educates its younger generations. Universities and other educational institutions are therefore important to peacebuilding. They are among the places where the foundations of a culture of peace can either be built or neglected.

The experience of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University provides a practical example of what this can mean. Led by its Dean, Prof Thillainathan Sathaananthan, the faculty organised an event which went beyond the ordinary academic scope of a medical faculty. University academics are experts in writing project proposals and applying for research grants. On this occasion, the members of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences used those skills to apply for a UNESCO grant that they won to conduct an International Peace Day event. The significance lies less in the Rs 200,000 grant than in the decision to use the university’s institutional capacity and resources to invest in peacebuilding. The event at Eastern University needs to be understood as more than a successful university programme. It represents a possible paradigm shift in peace thinking.

Institutional Commitment

The Peace Day event obtained the support of the university administration, including Vice Chancellor Prof P Peratheepan, and reached out to secondary schools in the vicinity to mobilise their attendance. The event itself was meticulously organised. There were cultural items including traditional and modern dance and song in the three languages, performed by combinations of solo, duet and multiple singers, dancers and actors drawn in part from nearby secondary schools. There was a panel discussion by senior academics on the general theme of peacebuilding and how to prepare for it. A discussion among the students followed, where each student spoke on behalf of a religion that was not theirs. This is significant because peacebuilding cannot remain an idea discussed by specialists at conferences. It has to become part of the way institutions educate and prepare people for life in a plural society.

The Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University has provided a model through its Peace Medicine course modules that were introduced to the curricular as a compulsory core course over 10 years ago. Two senior academics, Dr Kuveriel Eliyas Karunakaran and Dr Thillainathan Sathaananthan, have written a book on “Peace Medicine- A Health Care Concern” that was published five years ago. Its Peace Medicine Module integrates principles of medical ethics, compassion, equity, social justice and community engagement into health education and practice. In his introduction, former Vice Chancellor of Eastern University, Prof T Jayasingam noted “This book is an introduction to a theme which had already been operating in the Faculty of Health Care Sciences as a course.”

Doctors, nurses and health workers know better than anyone the harm that war and violence does. They are the people who treat the wounds and trauma that violence leaves behind. In a hospital, a patient is not asked what their religion or ethnicity is before they are treated. Health care is one of the places where peace is practised every day. The Faculty has therefore found a way of connecting its professional responsibilities with the wider social responsibility of peacebuilding. The question is whether this experience can be replicated throughout the country, at universities and at other educational institutions, so that peacebuilding becomes part of the consciousness of education itself. If that happens on a sufficient scale, it can begin to generate a culture of peace that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

Local Action

The Eastern University event corresponded closely to the United Nations theme for this year’s International Day of Peace, “Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day”, which honours the “everyday architects of peace”, people driving local action, laying the groundwork for stability and building lasting peace from the ground up. The emphasis on investment is important. An investment means that something is put in: time, courage and resources. There is no more violent conflict in Sri Lanka today. But the absence of war does not automatically produce a culture of peace. The factors that fed the country’s conflict have not disappeared from the world. Racism, corruption and the violation of laws and human rights are the raw materials of conflict. So too are unresolved grievances, discrimination and the failure to recognise the suffering of others.

A country that does not deal with its past does not escape it. The past can return in the next generation. This is why the experience of Eastern University needs to be replicated countrywide, both at universities and at other educational institutions. The objective should not be to turn every academic discipline into peace studies. Rather, peacebuilding needs to become part of the consciousness of education itself. Eastern University shows that a medical faculty can develop Peace Medicine. A law faculty can examine the relationship between justice, rights and peace. Faculties of education can prepare teachers to work in diverse communities, while the humanities and social sciences can examine the different narratives through which communities understand their histories. Every institution can find its own way of making peacebuilding relevant to what it teaches.

Sri Lanka has had many declarations, pledges and programmes in the past. What matters is whether these produce changes in behaviour and institutional practice. Peacebuilding requires confronting difficult issues rather than avoiding them. It requires respect for different identities, but also engagement across those identities. It requires dealing with grievances in the present while also addressing unresolved issues from the past. It requires truth, accountability, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. It requires people to learn that the rights of another community do not diminish their own rights. The International Peace Day event at Eastern University was evidence of a change in the way at least some academics in a part of the country deeply affected by war are thinking about their responsibilities. Peace needs to be invested in and the most important investment will be in the minds of those who will inherit the future.

Features

Quality assured education commodities

Published

17 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Ahilan Kadirgamar

I have always noticed the little paper tags that are inside the packaging of some products that say quality assured or quality control. I often wonder who might have checked the product and stamped that tag, but I also forget the tag soon enough. Decades later, when I entered academia, I was taken aback by the emphasis placed on quality assurance in our universities. It is not something that could be forgotten and done away with; the entire university system is obsessed with quality assurance.

Beginning with the staff induction programme, quality assurance is drilled into the newly recruited lecturers. It is the norm, not seen as doing any harm and only trying to improve quality. It is accepted as given, and not questioned. Quality Assurance Cells and Committees are omnipresent and hover above the Departments and, at times, even the Faculty Boards. Quality Assurance reviews are feared by the Deans and Vice Chancellors. University life itself seems secondary to the rule of quality assurance. What do we make of this system of quality assurance and what are its implications for our university system?

Corporate speak

Universities globally have been going through major changes with neoliberal education policies. In many countries, universities increasingly became corporatised to be run like businesses in the 1980s. As state support for universities declined, cost cutting became the norm. They started hiring adjunct or part-time staff. Many public non-fee levying universities around the world began to charge fees. Decade by decade, tuition fees became more and more exorbitant, forcing students to take student loans. The total student debt in the United States now stands at close to US$ 2 trillion; which is about 20 times the GDP of Sri Lanka. As the higher education landscape transformed in the West, university administrations began to recruit Presidents, Vice Chancellors and administrative officials with corporate backgrounds and experience.

Such corporatisation of universities in the West has since been imported into countries like Sri Lanka, introducing a new corporate vocabulary, including quality assurance, graduate competencies, programme outcomes, intended learning outcomes, etc. University teaching has become secondary to documenting so-called outcomes. The teacher-student relationship, the environment of the lecture hall and even administering the university have been over-determined by the processes of ensuring quality. How did such major changes come about in such a short time? Indeed, academics of just two generation ago, would never have heard of these terms and processes in the Sri Lankan university system.

World Bank Trojan horse

Since the early 2000s there have been a number of World Bank projects that have drastically changed the character of Sri Lankan universities. Quality assurance as a central agenda within universities, and many other changes to the working of our universities, came through these World Bank initiatives. The Improving Relevance and Quality of Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) project and Higher Education for the 21st Century (HETC) project were two such earlier projects that set up the Quality Assurance and Accreditation Unit (QAAU) under the University Grants Commission (UGC) and established systematic quality assurance reviews for state universities. The public often thinks these are grants from the World Bank to modernise our universities. However, they are not grants but loans.

The most recent such project, Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) is a US$ 100 million loan from the World Bank implemented from 2018 to 2023, which consolidated the quality assurance structures from the earlier projects. Furthermore, these projects are implemented with tremendous arrogance, prioritising their implementation over all other concerns in the universities, when the project over six years for example accounts for just one fourth of our budget allocation for universities this year.

The AHEAD project drastically changed course curricula, sought to increase student enrolment in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) disciplines, commercialise the university research agenda and create university-business linkages. All of this was pushed to supposedly help us face development challenges. We have heard the ideological attack on our universities and even students claiming they are “unemployable graduates”. These changes to our higher education system were supposedly going to create jobs and increase employment.

The irony of the AHEAD project is that just as it was ending in 2023, apparently after having reached its targets, the Sri Lankan economy was collapsing. The World Bank often gets the direction of causality wrong. It is the economy that creates jobs for graduates, and not the training or kind of graduates that create jobs. It is decades of World Bank policies, and those of its ideological twin the IMF, that have led to such high youth unemployment, not only in Sri Lanka but also in many other countries in the global South.

Sri Lanka entered an IMF agreement in March 2023 and started a new Country Partnership Framework with the World Bank in June 2023. These programmes have little to say about, and actively discourage, government initiatives that aim to create an industrial policy or an employment creation policy. Instead, they push for austerity measures, which not only restrict the allocation for education among other sectors, but also end up contracting the economy to the detriment of increasing employment. Their goal is the commercialisation of higher education, to make universities into businesses and run them like factories.

In this context, the ideology of quality assurance is powerful. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), whose different standards are necessary for marketing, is the institution that came up with the concept of “quality assurance”. It promoted quality assurance as a process of identifying defected products. Therefore, when the World Bank promotes this conceptual framing, our students are, in fact, seen as products on the assembly line, with quality assurance processes aiming to prevent the release of defected products from the university system. For the US$ 100 million we borrowed for the AHEAD project and the many more million dollars in similar World Bank projects, there is no evidence of increased employment of graduates.

Commodity fetishism

Over a century and a half ago, Karl Marx critiqued the economic analysis prevalent at that time that associated some inherent or monetary value for commodities without considering the social relations that underlie the production of those commodities. Marx called this commodity fetishism. Furthermore, he theorised that such commodity fetishism was also a reason for the alienation of human beings from the world. If our labour and what we produce is seen devoid of the social relations that underlie them, we lose our connection with the people and the world. In this process we become alienated from what we produce and the world.

We are now in a world where our students themselves are fetishised as commodities for the market. Universities are no longer communities concerned about knowledge and human growth, but mere factories producing commodities, which have to be produced without defects to be marketed. In this way, quality assurance has become the cause for the alienation of students, academics and our universities themselves, from the larger relationship with our economy and society.

Our university system does need reform. It is grossly underfunded and not providing the financial support and facilities for our students. Universities have become hierarchical spaces without the academic freedom and democratic ethos necessary for producing knowledge. Academics and students need to engage more with their communities to make their learning and research meaningful, not to mention their contribution to and integration with society. However, when it comes to even questions of governance and regulation of the universities, such concerns are merely reduced to improving quality. In our contemporary times, this singular focus on quality assurance, as opposed to addressing the larger structural issues, is crippling our universities. There may be no way out, but to put back quality assurance where it started, those little tags on goods, to perhaps be noticed but quickly forgotten.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and Senior Lecturer, University of Jaffna.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies)

Features

Thailand’s biggest new global star …

Published

17 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

The entertainment scene, globally, is agog with excitement, and, why not!

Yes, a new global star has emerged … from Thailand, and she hit the headlines by winning America’s Got Talent.

Rattikarn Amloy, known to millions by her stage name Nene Royal, was crowned the winner of America’s Got Talent (AGT) Season 21 at the live finale at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, California, taking home the USD 1 million grand prize.

The 16-year-old rocker, from the holiday island of Phuket (I’ve been to Phuket, courtesy Tourism Authority of Thailand), has struck a power chord around the world, and is the first Thai national ever to win the hit NBC show.

She beat nine other finalists, including runner-up magician Geno Ploeger, after a blistering final performance.

Nene’s story is pure rock and roll fairy-tale. She says she picked up a guitar at age seven, fell in love at the first chord, and taught herself mostly by watching videos online. That dedication earned her a music scholarship to Kajonkiet International School Phuket.

Her audition at America’s Got Talent — a swaggering, shredding rendition of The Cranberries’ classic ‘Zombie’ — exploded online, amassing over 200 million views across AGT’s platforms, more than any act this season.

She kept wowing: ‘Hysteria’ by Muse, then ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden which earned her Spice Girl Mel B’s Golden Buzzer, sending her straight to the live shows.

For the final, she unleashed ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. Judge Howie Mandel shouted: “You should win. Give her the million, America.” Mel B praised her “mysterious, mystical stage presence”.

And for the grand finale, she lived every teen rocker’s dream — performing on stage, alongside US rock giants Linkin Park.

When host Terry Crews announced her as winner, the teenager collapsed to the stage floor in tears. “I’m very happy and you know I’m emotional right now,” she said.

And Thailand erupted. Her school held watch parties, posting: “You did it, congratulations, champion. We are so proud of you.”

Even Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul sent a personal congratulation. He had earlier hosted Nene at Government House in July, where she played guitar while he sang a Thai rock song. His office said her talent “brought pride to Thai people.”

Corporate Thailand also rallied behind her — Charoen Pokphand Foods, owned by billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, even rented a giant billboard in Times Square, New York, to cheer her on.

With her blistering guitar solos, rock-ballad shrieks and fearless spirit, little Nene Royal has just become Thailand’s biggest new global star.

What’s more, this amazing teenager will be bringing her powerful vocals, guitar skills and signature rock-metal style to the stage, as opening act, before one of the world’s biggest rock bands, America’s Avenged Sevenfold, in Singapore, on 13 October.

Unfortunately, we are still to see a local artiste, grab the spotlight, on a global scale … like Thailand’s Nene.

Yes, they do shine, but mostly on social media, and that, too, with the aid of AI (Artificial Intellegence).