Teens who are out to change the world ~ Series 1

Standing for what is right: Zhan Haite is an unlikely crusader against China's draconian residence registration system. – Reuter

Gone are the days when the young are supposed to be ‘seen and not heard’ as these youths have proven.

MALALA Yousafzai, who met Queen Elizabeth II on Oct 18, has received plenty of plaudits for her campaigning, but the Pakistani schoolgirl is not the only teenager trying to make the world a better place. Here is a list of six others.

Most Chinese political activists are grizzled lawyers, scholars and artists, one-time insiders that have been cast loose. Zhan Haite doesn’t fit the mold. Meet Zhan Haite.


Last winter, Zhan, an ambitious 15-year-old middle-school student in Shanghai, became an unlikely crusader against the country’s draconian residence registration system, the hukou, a bureaucratic knot tying hundreds of millions of migrant workers to their rural hometowns.

Although Zhan attended primary and middle school in Shanghai – she moved there with her family in 2002 – she lacked a local hukou, precluding her from taking the city’s high school entrance examination. Zhan was told she had two options: attend a vocational school, or return to her ancestral village, where opportunities are scarce.

Instead, Zhan decided to speak out. She organised a protest in front of Shanghai’s education bureau, and posted a flurry of dissenting messages online. At first, the backlash was severe. Her family was briefly evicted. Local authorities threw her father in jail.

Yet Zhan’s message was well-timed – hukou reform had recently risen to the top of the national agenda – and state-run media outlets began to take notice. Zhan was allowed to pen an op-ed in the China Daily newspaper, which ran under the headline “Teen Girl Makes Case for Change”.

In an interview in December, Zhan listed her heroes as Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi and Hu Shi, a prominent Chinese essayist who died in 1962. “Hu Shi once said that fighting for your rights is fighting for the nation’s rights, and fighting for your freedom is fighting for the nation’s freedom,” she said. “A free and democratic country cannot be made up of slaves.”

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