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The Europainstitut Congratulates Yim Fong Chan on the Successful Defense of Her PhD Dissertation
Yim Fong Chan’s PhD Defense: Yim Fong Chan (center) with Prof. Dr. Frithjof Benjamin Schenk (far left), Prof. Dr. Thierry Meynard (left) and Prof. Dr. Ralph Weber (right).
Yim Fong Chan successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled «Twisted Souls in Confucianism: Liang Shuming and Feng Youlan in the PRC (1949–1976)» on 17 March 2025.
Her thesis explores the localization of Marxism in China and the reactions of Chinese intellectuals during the Mao Zedong era, covering a large amount of primary literature in Chinese (some of it analyzed in such depth for the first time in English-language scholarship). The project particularly focuses on the philosophical writings of two prominent Confucian thinkers, Liang Shuming (1893–1988) and Feng Youlan (1895–1990), as well as on the conditions of knowledge production during this period. Yim Fong Chan’s overarching point is to show how these two Confucian scholars were driven by their self-understanding as traditional scholar-officials (shi 士) as they also subscribed to the modernist agenda of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China – leaving their souls not just being «lost», but quintessentially «twisted».
The first supervisor of the project was Prof. Dr. Ralph Weber, Associate Professor for European Global Studies at the Europainstitut. Prof. Dr. Thierry Meynard, Professor of Philosophy at Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, acted as the second supervisor. The defense was chaired by Prof. Dr. Frithjof Benjamin Schenk.
Yim Fong Chan was an SNSF fellow in the project The Exterior of Philosophy at the Institute for European Global Studies. Since September 2024, she has worked as a research assistant in Prof. Dr. Ralph Weber’s project «Mapping New Confucian Networks (1911–2021)». Her general research interests lie in the area of New Confucianism and Chinese intellectual history.