Tan Kah-Kee

The following sections are included:

• Preface

• Acknowledgments

• Contents

• Tables

• Maps

• Plates

• Abbreviations

• Introduction

ON 12 August 1961, there passed away in Peking an extraordinary man at a ripe old age of 87. He was accorded a State funeral by the Government of the People’s Republic of China in recognition of his deeds and achievements during his lifetime. Among his mourners were some of the top-ranking party, military and government officials in the land, including Chu Teh, Chou En-lai, Ch’en Yi, Ch’en Po-ta, Liao Ch’eng-chih and Tung Pi-wu. Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-ch’i, Madam Sun Yat-sen and many others laid their wreaths and sent their condolences to the deceased’s family.¹ From Peking, the hearse was carried by train and arrived on 20 August for a final burial at the Ao Garden at Chi Mei on a grand and extensive ground covering some 8,789 square feet. There an ornate, elaborate and personally designed tomb had long been completed as his final resting place. Thousands of mourners from Fukien province lined the roads and streets from Chi Mei right up to the Ao Garden to pay their last homage to the best and proudest son ever produced in the area in modern times — Tan Kah-kee…

LOCATED in the southern part of Fukien, T’ung An was one of the five districts of Ch’uanchou prefecture, separating Changchou prefecture to the south-west from Foochow prefecture to the north east. The size of T’ung An was approximately that of the island of Singapore (225 square miles), its population of a quarter of a million in 1911 being equivalent to that of the total population of Singapore during the same period. The district is mountainous in its hinterland, becoming less undulating towards the coastal regions. On the north, it merges with the district of An Ch’i, a hilly and rugged tea-producing area. On the east, it is flanked by Nan An district, while on the west, its borders link up with Ch’ang T’ai and Hai Ch’ng districts of Changchou prefecture. On the south, the roaring South China Sea sweeps its coastlines with Amoy and Quemoy islands guarding its doorway. On a clear and calm day from the T’ien-ma mountain ranges at T’ung An, one can catch a glimpse of the Amoy island, for over a century one of the southern centres for the exodus of millions of Chinese from Fukien…

THE forceful style and qualities of the T’ung An leadership, enshrined in the ‘T’ung An spirit’, could not have blossomed forth so brilliantly in Singapore without other factors being brought to play. These included the formidable economic base of Tan Kah-kee, his pre-eminent social status as a result of his promotion of community welfare among the Chinese, his crucial control of key institutional bases and his relatively cordial working relationship with the British authorities. Moreover, emergent Chinese nationalism in South-East Asia made the rise of stronger and more hardened leaders possible. Similarly, it can be argued that the ‘Ta-p’u spirit’¹ of Lee Kuan-yew (b.1923) in post-war Singapore could not have flowered so dramatically without a set of favourable conditions, peculiar to his times, being available. These consisted of Lee Kuan-yew’s professional and educational qualifications, his own charisma, his mass-oriented institutional and political bases, his growing political prestige and influence amidst rising Malayan nationalism and his acceptability as an outstanding political figure by the British authorities. In various ways, both leaders had something in common — their interest in power and leadership and their will to succeed. While Lee Kuan-yew was more obsessed with a political power which would allow him to modernize Singapore as a new nation with or without a merger with Malaysia, Tan Kah-kee was primarily more concerned with community power and leadership for promoting Chinese interests in South-East Asia and China. Because Lee Kuan-yew was a product of Malayan nationalism and Tan Kah-kee of Chinese nationalism, it is not surprising that they possessed different political and ideological orientations and emphases…

UNTIL recent times in China, the scholar–gentry topped the social scale and possessed unchallenged status symbols and power in officialdom, scholarship and landownership. It was a combination of these three assets that enabled them to remain a self-perpetuating ruling class for over a thousand years after the institutionalization of the imperial civil service examinations in the T’ang dynasty (618–907). By contrast, colonial regimes in South-East Asia restricted and impeded Chinese political mobility and prevented the scholar–gentry from ever forming a ruling élite in a colonial setting…

The Chinese community in pre-war Singapore and Malaya was basically a pang community rather than a class society. Pang is an age-old Chinese concept to denote a socio-political grouping. When emigrants from the two maritime Chinese provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien settled in South-East Asia, they used the word to mean dialect grouping of immigrants from a more or less well demarcated emigrating area, for example, Foochow, Ch’uanchou, Changchou, Teochew, Canton, Ta-p’u, Hainan Island, etc. Thus, immigrants from Fukien who spoke the Hokkien dialect belonged to the Hokkien pang, likewise those from the Hakkaland of Kwangtung the Hakka pang…

TAN KAH-KEE’s personal political experience commenced with the Sino-French War (1884–5) and the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5). On both occasions, he happened to be at home in Chi Mei, hearing and sensing the peril China was in. His latent anti-Manchu feelings were steadily being built up during the 1900s with the visits of Chinese reformists and revolutionaries to Singapore. These political exiles attempted to enlist Overseas Chinese support and to propagate their contending ideologies on reform, revolution and modernization of China…

THE deportation of Hau Say-huan and further British tightening of political control had the effect of forcing the various relief fund committees throughout Malaya to take stock. Many were forced to review and abolish their collections and propaganda methods to which the government had taken exception, including the use of tar by some of their members against shops suspected of selling Japanese goods. There was a purge of another kind. As was to be expected, ‘Committee members known to be connected with the Anti-Enemy Backing-up Society (AEBUS) were removed from office and most of the Committees have shown themselves anxious to end their relations with it’.¹ There was also the reorganization of the various fund-raising committees. One of the victims of this restructuring was the propaganda department which was abolished because it was regarded by the British authorities as ‘the root of the most of its evil’.² In Singapore, it was reported that some of the sub-branches of the fund which had been opened by Hau Say-huan or were discovered to be dominated by the AEBUS were closed down.³ In addition, the government enforced its ban on propaganda shows, dramatic performances and singing parties and re stricted the committee’s flag days to three a year as a fund-raising device.⁴ In short, the government succeeded in limiting and hampering the fund-raising efforts of the various committees in Malaya, thus ushering an era of steady decline in fund-raising activities among the relief fund committees…

ON 6 October 1945, Tan Kah-kee arrived back in Singapore from Batavia with mixed feelings. Driven from the Kallang Airport to his former residence, the Ee Ho Hean Club, then still under repair, he was elated to see many of his old friends who had survived the ordeal of the Japanese Occupation. However, he was saddened by the news of the death of his third son, Tan Pok-ai, and his fourth son-in-law, Oon Khye-hong, as well as other human tragedies arising from the Japanese rule in South-East Asia…

As a young immigrant from Chi Mei to Singapore, Tan Kah-kee rose from an unknown character in 1890 to a folk hero and legend by the time he died in Peking in 1961. In his life and times, Tan Kah-kee presented various images to his contemporaries. He presented himself as a self-made man, a public figure, a dominating and feared father, an ambitious entrepreneur and industrialist, a philanthropist rarely matched by his peers, a revered patriarch to his friends, clansmen, employees and graduates of his educational institutions in Singapore and in China, and a formidable and somewhat controversial political character, honoured by Mao Tse-tung but condemned by the Kuomintang high command. In post-war Singapore and Malaya, Kuomintang members labelled him their ‘Public Enemy No. 1’, accusing him of abusing his power as chairman of the SCRFU in the ‘cable crisis’ of 1946. The British naturally disapproved of his moral support for Mao Tse-tung at a time when they were suppressing the Malayan communist insurgency. They referred to him as Mao’s ‘Fellow Traveller’. Tan Kah-kee was by no means perfect as either a private citizen or a public man, but even his contemporaries, friends and foes alike, found it hard to fault him…

The following sections are included:

• Glossary

• Bibliography

• Index