[8] In 1929 he travelled outside of the Indies for the first time in his life, touring the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, following a few years later with his first trip to China in 1933.
[1] But, as with many other Indies Chinese intellectuals during the late 1920s and early 1930s, he also became increasingly sympathetic to the rising Indonesian nationalist movement.
He was a close personal friend of a number of nationalist leaders including Sukarno, Sartono, and WR Soepratman.
[4] He also used his position at Sin Po to publish 5000 leaflets containing the score of the nationalist song Indonesia Raya, which were distributed with the paper in November 1928.
[5] He himself planned to stay in Batavia under the assumed name Thio Boen Hiok, but soon found it too dangerous and fled to Bandung, where he spent most of the war.
[4] For example, he was co-writer of the Memorandum Commissie Chung Hwa Hui in 1947 which documented abuses against the Chinese population by the Indonesian republican forces.