and Lee Kong Chian, his protégé and a businessman. Tan was one of the prominent overseas Chinese to provide financial support to China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He organised many relief funds under his name, one of which alone managed to raise ten million Straits dollars in 1937. He was also a participant in the Legislative Yuan of the Nationalist government in Chongqing. After the Japanese invaded and occupied Malaya and Singapore in 1942, they deemed these contributors "undesirable" and conducted systematic extermination of anti-Japanese elements in Singapore through the Sook Ching Massacre. Tan survived because he escaped from Singapore before it fell to the Japanese, and went into hiding in Malang, a town in East Java province, Indonesia. He strongly rejected proposals to attempt to negotiate with the Japanese and regarded such attempts as characteristic of a hanjian (a Chinese term for race traitor). He also attempted to dissuade Wang Jingwei from such activities. He exercised considerable effort against the governor of Fujian Province, Chen Yi, 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 (), 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 Chinese Chamber of Commerce and helping to organise the Hokkien clan association. However, he lost this role when the Chinese Civil War divided Singapore's Chinese community into Communist and Kuomintang sympathisers. Tan was a Communist supporter due to the corruption within the Kuomintang. In 1947 Tan founded the Chiyu Banking Corporation in Hong Kong, an intended to be a sustainable business with profits to be devoted to education in Xiamen and the rest of Fujian province in China. 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 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 Tan Kah Kee Foundation, was established in