Thio Chan Bee was a schoolmaster and educator from South-East Asia. His person page gives his nationality as Malaysian. His link with Moral Re-Armament (MRA) goes back at least to 1948, when he was photographed with Dr Sih Kwang-Tsein, chargé d’affaires at the Chinese Embassy in Berne, and V. G. Dalvi, general secretary of the Indian postal workers’ union. He also appears in reports in New World News from 1948 and 1951, and he spoke at a Caux meeting on 4 June 1954.
His main work was building trust across racial and political divides between Singapore and Malaysia. In the 1970 film Asia’s Destiny, he is introduced as an eminent Chinese educator from Singapore. He describes his wish to improve relations between the two countries, and how he was guided to meet Tan Sri Syed Jaafar Albar, who had been regarded as public enemy number one of Singapore’s Chinese community. The two men were later photographed together, and in 1970 Thio Chan Bee sat on Albar’s Committee of Hosts in Malaysia for the musical “Anything to Declare?”.
In 1977 he published his autobiography, Extraordinary Adventures of an Ordinary Man (Grosvenor Books). It tells how a schoolmaster quietly helped resolve communal differences, get opposing politicians to work together and build trust between labour and management. Malcolm MacDonald wrote the foreword and called the book a real contribution to contemporary history. Thio Chan Bee continued to appear in MRA publications, including New World News in 1979.
