People on social media in China and the West can’t stop comparing Alysa Liu and Eileen Gu, two of the biggest stars at the Winter Olympics. It’s hard not to. Both were born and raised in the Bay Area. Both have a parent from China. Both are sports prodigies.
In Milan, Ms. Liu, 20, became the first American in 24 years to win gold in women’s figure skating, and she added a second gold in the team event. Ms. Gu, 22, won one gold and two silvers in freestyle skiing.
The difference: Ms. Liu, whose father was a Tiananmen-era dissident who fled China for the United States in 1989, was on Team U.S.A. Ms. Gu, who obtained a Chinese passport in 2019, chose to represent China.
In the United States, many people celebrated Ms. Liu’s performance as a win for liberty, while some, like the former N.B.A. player Enes Kanter Freedom and various conservative media figures, have called Ms. Gu a traitor. Several politicians have accused her of supporting America’s adversary.
On the Chinese internet, the treatment of the two women was largely reversed. On the Chinese social media platform Weibo, for instance, a user based in Guangdong commented, “Eileen Gu is a hero of China while Alysa Liu is a descendant of an anti-China figure.”
The reaction is both unfortunate and predictable. As the United States and China intensify a geopolitical rivalry that could determine global leadership deep into the 21st century, nationalism on both sides has intensified.
The uncomfortable comparison so many are making between Ms. Liu and Ms. Gu speaks to more than sport. It exposes questions of heritage, loyalty and identity, thrusting the two athletes into the politics of both countries. Much of the commentary is a proxy for rival nationalism: on the American side, increasingly vocal demands that immigrants prove their allegiance; on the Chinese side, an insistence that Chinese ethnicity demands loyalty and that dissent is betrayal.
The Chinese Communist Party has long advanced an ethnonationalist idea of belonging: that people of Chinese descent, wherever they reside and whatever passport they hold, remain part of the Chinese nation. Under Xi Jinping, who took full power in 2013, this principle has strengthened: Ethnicity has become a bond that carries expectations of loyalty.
Many Chinese people, in and outside the country, who criticize or question official Beijing positions, not only political activists but journalists too, are invariably labeled sellouts or worse.
This is worth keeping in mind when Americans call Ms. Gu a traitor. They’re borrowing the Chinese Communist Party’s vocabulary and adopting its framework of birthplace loyalty.
The ethnonationalist philosophy also explains the scale of China’s investment in athletes of Chinese heritage. Of the 48 players on China’s men’s and women’s Olympic hockey teams in 2022, 22 of them were naturalized athletes with Chinese lineage.
Ms. Gu was the most visible example of this recruitment effort. When she switched to represent China in 2019, she became a geopolitical asset for Beijing.
A Beijing city government document published last year showed that the municipal sports bureau planned to pay Ms. Gu and one other American-born athlete competing for China a combined $14 million over three years. Their names were later scrubbed from the record after it drew public criticism. The episode offered a rare glimpse into how the state invests in athletic success as a form of soft power.
If Ms. Gu’s case illustrates how the state embraces certain members of the Chinese diaspora, Ms. Liu’s family story illustrated how it treats others.
Her father, Arthur Liu, was a student activist who ended up on the government’s most wanted list after the Tiananmen crackdown. He fled to the United States, became a lawyer and raised five children as a single father. Alysa is the oldest. She started skating at 5 and became national champion at 13. Mr. Liu said in media interviews that he had been approached about having Alysa represent China but declined out of concerns about the country’s human rights record.
Before the 2022 Beijing Olympics, it was reported at the time, U.S. authorities informed Mr. Liu that he and Alysa were targets of a Chinese government-linked surveillance and harassment effort. The U.S. government provided protection for Alysa during the games. She was 16. It was her first trip to China.
Mr. Liu also said he learned that Beijing was aware that his daughter had once posted an Instagram message about the government’s crackdown on the ethnic minority Uyghurs in China.
When Ms. Liu won gold medals in Milan, she became a problem that China’s censorship apparatus could not quite solve. Praise for her skating on the internet in China was often followed by vague warnings, usually from commenters, to “look up her family background and political orientation.” They couldn’t be more specific and had to resort to euphemisms and coded language because references to June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen massacre, are heavily censored. She is sometimes called a “second-generation anti-China figure.”
If parts of China struggle with how to absorb Ms. Liu’s story, parts of the United States struggle to understand Ms. Gu’s. Their underlying logic — that identity carries duty — sounds familiar to the ears of many Chinese.
At the same time, some on the American political left risk flattening all criticism of Ms. Gu as racism, sidestepping questions about how authoritarian governments deploy athletes and soft power.
Ms. Gu grew up with feet in both worlds, but the rivalry between Washington and Beijing has narrowed the space for dual belonging.
She spent most summers in Beijing, her mother’s hometown. She speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and in 2019, at 15, became a naturalized Chinese citizen, joining Beijing’s effort to project national strength on the global stage. It proved to be a lucrative arrangement for both sides. Ms. Gu has won six Olympic medals for China and became one of the highest-earning female athletes in the world, with most of her sponsors being Chinese brands and global brands targeting the Chinese market.
Ms. Gu has declined to comment on her citizenship status — Chinese law forbids dual citizenship — and on China’s human rights record. Time magazine asked her recently about the treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. She replied that she did not think it was her business to comment. She was not an expert, she said, and reaching a conclusion would require extensive research and a visit to the region in China.
Her response set off criticism from human rights activists. “Choosing who you represent is a personal decision. No one is a traitor for that,” wrote the Digital Citizens for Human Rights, an X account that focuses on China. “You don’t need to speak for power. But you cannot claim innocence while benefiting from it.”
Even on Chinese social media, Ms. Gu is a divisive figure. While many Chinese people hail her as a hero and address her adoringly as the “snow princess,” some criticize her for having the privilege of being “a part-time Chinese” — being Chinese when it is profitable and American when it is convenient.
“She gets to have it both ways. Must be nice,” one commenter wrote on Weibo, the Chinese internet platform.
Li Yuan writes The New New World column, which focuses on China’s growing influence on the world by examining its businesses, politics and society.
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