Born in 1883, Tan Cheng Lock was a Baba-Chinese whose ancestor Tan Hay Kwan arrived in Malaya in 1771.  

His grandfather Tan Choon Bock founded one of the first steamship companies in Malaya. 

Highly-educated and well-read in both Western and Chinese political philosophy, Cheng Lock was a teacher of English language and literature at Raffles Institution in Singapore before embarking on a successful career as a rubber planter. 

In 1910, he formed United Malacca Rubber Estates, a company still listed on the Malaysian stock exchange. 

Cheng Lock's oratorical prowess and his high status within the Chinese community in Malacca – facilitated by his business acumen and marriage to Yeo Yeok Neo, daughter of the leader of Malacca's Hokkien community – caught the early attention of British officials, who appointed him to a number of key positions in the colonial government. 

He became a Malacca municipal commissioner in 1912 and a Straits Settlements Legislative Council member in 1923, serving on its Executive Council from 1933 to 1938. 

Also highly regarded within the Straits Chinese community, Cheng Lock in 1915 was elected president of the Malacca Straits China British Association, a body formed in 1900 to safeguard the political status of Straits-born Chinese as British subjects. 

Cheng Lock's proposal to form a “Malayan Chinese Association” was first articulated in 1943 when he was living in exile in India during the Japanese Occupation.  

He wanted to use the MCA as the primary vehicle to inculcate Malayan loyalty among the Chinese population. 

For Cheng Lock, the new party's key objectives would be to wean Chinese away from China-centric preoccupations, to involve them in Malayan nationalist politics, and to focus the collective Chinese mind on the urgent task of getting citizenship rights in an independent Malaya. 

In February 1949, Cheng Lock's brainchild took concrete form when it received the active backing of British High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney to garner Chinese support against the communist insurrection.  

Others who helped in the formation of the MCA were Tun H.S. Lee and Tun Leong Yew Koh. 

Cheng Lock's election as MCA president gave him a powerful political vehicle – a mass-based party built upon the country's extensive network of Chinese guilds and associations, the former Kuomintang movement and the Straits Chinese community – to pursue his political objectives. 

Buttressed by the party's welfare work among the half million Chinese who were resettled in 440 New Villages during the Emergency, the MCA's membership reached 300,000 by 1954. 

Cheng Lock was the first Malayan-Chinese figure to recognise that the immigrant Chinese population would need to show undivided loyalty to Malaya in order to earn the privileges of citizenship.  

His eloquent advocacy of Chinese aspirations combined with an ability to gain the respectful attention of British officials and Malay nationalist leaders made it possible for his ideas to be given concrete form in 1957. 

His political vision and ideas for a self-governing, democratic, multiracial Malaya are available in a landmark publication Malayan Problems From a Chinese Point of View, a compilation of his key speeches and writings spanning the period 1926-1947. 

Not only did his ideas on nation-building and inter-ethnic relations impact decisively on the development of nationalist politics during the 1940s and 1950s, they still remain germane to the complex interplay of multiracial politics in Malaysia.