If the universities are doing this, one wonders what CASIC and CASC are up too.
They better performed Tan Kah Kee give all his considerable wealth estimated at 430 million US dollar to built and maintained the university thru WW I and WWII until the founding of China He practically bankrupt his company leaving nothing to his descendant who has to fend for themselves. His accounting and everybody else admonish him not to do that but he care less. It is crazy He built another university and maritime school at his hometown Jimei next to Xiamen. There will be no one like him. Because of it His son in law Lee Kong Chian another giant of Overseas Chinese change the mind set of overseas Chinese and recommend and fight for this countrymen to consider SEA as home and take local citizenship. He was long time president of University of Malaysia, organized strike to demand citizenship for overseas chinese. great philatropher founder of trust fund to help poor student
During Japanese occupation he hide in Java and everytime he has meeting he bring with him cyanide pill in case he get caught by Japanese he will swallowed the pill. But the Japanese never found him His compatriot hide him well in small town Batu east java
Tan was one of the prominent overseas Chinese to provide financial support to China during the
. He organised many relief funds under his name, one of which alone managed to raise ten million
in 1937. He was also a participant in the
of the Nationalist government in
. After the Japanese invaded and occupied Malaya and Singapore in 1942, they deemed these contributors "
undesirable" and conducted a systematic extermination of anti-Japanese elements in Singapore through the . Tan survived because he escaped from Singapore before it fell to the Japanese, and went into hiding in , . He strongly rejected proposals to attempt to negotiate with the Japanese and regarded such attempts as characteristic of a
(a Chinese term for
). He also attempted to dissuade
from such activities. He exercised considerable effort against the governor of Fujian Province,
, for perceived maladministration.
In 1943, while he was in Java, Tan began writing his memoirs,
The Memoirs of an Overseas Chinese of the Southern Ocean (南僑回憶錄; 南侨回忆录;
Nánqiáo Huíyìlù), which later became an important document of the history of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia.
Tan was the
de facto leader of the Chinese community in Singapore, serving as chairman of the
and helping to organise the
. However, he lost this role when the
divided Singapore's Chinese community into
and
sympathisers. Tan was a Communist supporter because he was disillusioned with the corruption within the Kuomintang.[
] After the Communist victory in China and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Tan tried to return to Singapore in 1950, but was denied entry by the British colonial authorities, who were concerned about communist influence in Singapore and Malaya. He then moved permanently to China and served in numerous positions in the Chinese Communist Party.
Tan died in 1961 in Beijing and was given a state funeral by the Chinese government. In Singapore, the Tan Kah Kee Scholarship Fund, which later became known as the
, was established in memory of this philanthropy.