TEDxBISZ Youth

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Ava Tian

  Ava Tian is a student at BASIS International School Shenzhen and a youth advocate focused on mental health awareness, disability inclusion, and accessibility. Alongside learning sign language and promoting disability awareness through school initiatives, her work explores how cultural perceptions of productivity and success can contribute to ableism and the stigmatization of mental health challenges, particularly within Chinese communities. Through projects such as Mugs of Hope, which raised over 22,000 HKD for charity, and student-led mental health awareness initiatives connected to SDB8, Ava has worked to encourage more open conversations surrounding emotional well-being and accessibility. Her TEDx talk examines how stigma surrounding mental health in China is reinforced by cultural ideas of ableism and the lack of accessible support systems for young people.

• Bella Lu

  N/A

• Emma Lin

  Emma Lin is a G10 student at BASIS. She’s from Taiwan and raised in mainland China, growing up at the intersection of cultural difference and political tension. In her speech, Emma explores how structural narratives, censorship and silence shape the way we see other. Drawing from personal experience, she challenges what it really means to truly see and speak for each another.

• Makayla Zhong

  Makayla Zhong is a rising junior at BASIS International School Shenzhen. She has served as Novice Captain of her school debate team for the past three years. She has twice directed the Shenzhen Interschool Debate Cup and also helps lead Inkwell, her school’s writing club. She began developing this talk after noticing the difference between Chinese and Western cultural relationships to eating chicken, and how language can erase the living being behind what is consumed. Her talk examines how that same logic reduces women into bodies, products, and parts to be judged and consumed, shaping the way girls learn to police themselves while normalizing the dehumanization behind exploitation and abuse. Outside of debate, she is an artist, a writer, and an enthusiastic participant in the act of extended unconsciousness most effectively conducted in a horizontal position, aka sleep.

• Qianchen Sun

  Eric is a chill guy. He likes to watch basketball and F1, play his Playstation, and collect shoes. He spends the majority of his free time either doomscrolling on Instagram or watching World War 2 videos on YouTube. Eric also likes to eat. He loves Japanese, Chinese, British, and Italian foods. He is very athletic as he knows how to play basketball. He likes K-Pop the most, and his bias is SOOBIN of Tomorrow by Together.

• Rachel Zhang

  Rachel Yanyi Zhang is a rising senior who is deeply interested in Indigenous history and different languages. Her work focuses on the Sámi people of Northern Scandinavia, and explores how colonialism persists even today, often invisibly. Growing up between cultures, she questions how identities are shaped, translated, and even eroded. She hopes her work could encourage people to think more critically about the stories, maps, and systems surrounding them.