Fan Yun (politician)

Fan was born in Tamsui District, Taipei County (now New Taipei City), on July 9, 1968. She has three sisters. Her father was a Kuomintang soldier who moved to Taiwan from Jiangsu in 1949 during the Great Retreat, and her mother was a Taiwanese native of Yunlin.^[1] Fan's parents were the owners of a noodle shop and general store in Tamsui.^[2]

After graduating from Taipei First Girls' High School, she attended National Taiwan University (NTU) and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) and a Master of Science (M.S.), both in sociology. As a student there, she was the president of the NTU Mainland Society [zh] (臺灣大學大陸問題研究社), an anti-communist student activist group, and ran to be president of the university's student union. She also participated in the Wild Lily student movement.^[2]

In 2000, Fan earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University.^[3] Her doctoral dissertation, completed under political scientist Frances McCall Rosenbluth, was titled, "Activists in a changing political environment: A microfoundational study of social movements in Taiwan's democratic transition, 1980s–1990s".^[4] The thesis won Yale's 2001 Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize for the most outstanding dissertation of the last two years.^[5]

Fan was elected a member of the Legislative Yuan in the 2020 Taiwanese legislative election, and took office on February 1, 2020, as a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).^[3]