Eileen Gu Wins Gold—for China
Chinese American freestyle skier Eileen Gu is an even bigger star in China after winning gold at the 2022 Beijing Olympics on Tuesday. But she faces attacks in the United States for switching to China’s Olympic team—and possibly abandoning her U.S. citizenship to do so. Gu, now just 18 years old, began competing for China in 2019, amid the exposure of internment camps in Xinjiang and mass protests in Hong Kong.
All of this is a lot for a teenager to carry. But this week, Chinese social media was briefly consumed by more drama after Ray Sidney, an early Google employee, posted a picture of himself and a young Gu. Gu’s father’s identity is not public, and the idea that it might be Sidney led to online speculation. Sidney quickly said he was not Gu’s father but had dated her mother when Gu was young and remains friends with her.
The story speaks to a key fact about Gu. She represents a world that is vanishing: the shared space of the Chinese and American elite. Her mother, Yan Gu, is the daughter of a decorated Chinese government official; she came to the United States for postgraduate studies and later worked first for investment banks in the United States and as a venture capitalist between California and China.
Growing up, Eileen Gu enjoyed the power of wealth in both China and the United States, attending a very expensive private school in the United States and taking math Olympiad classes in Beijing before getting into Stanford University.
The privilege involved in hopping between San Francisco and Shanghai or New York and Beijing was once common among a certain subset. This group included children of Communist Party leaders, such as businessman Bo Guagua (son of the later disgraced politician Bo Xilai) and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s daughter Xi Mingze, who both attended Harvard University. But some Beijing upper-middle class families who attained moderate wealth from the capital’s real estate boom also placed their kids in U.S. high schools or obtained investor visas for themselves.
This so-called Chimerican elite represented a tiny fraction of the Chinese population, but a tiny fraction of 1.3 billion people is still a lot of people. Their lifestyle was premised on easy movement between the two countries, enjoying the freedoms of one and the privileges of the other—and transferring money with relative ease as well. That distinguished them from poorer immigrants to the United States, for whom borders were an obstacle.
In the United States, Gu’s mother enjoyed the ability to raise a child on her own without significant legal problems. Single parenthood, which was illegal in China until 1997, is still difficult there—not only because of social stigma but also because of fines and punishments for having children outside of marriage and the challenge of obtaining legal certificates for those children. In part, the Chinese public is fascinated with the question of Gu’s father’s identity because single parents are so rare outside of poor or rural areas.
But that easy movement has greatly eroded in recent years, at first by questions of politics and identity and then by the coronavirus pandemic. Investment visas, one of the most common entry points to the United States, came under scrutiny during the Trump administration, as did visas for Chinese students. Meanwhile, ties to the United States became a source of political risk in China. And under Xi, it became much tougher to get money out of the country (even by illegal means), especially after the 2015-2016 Chinese stock market crisis.
The ultimate way to span the Pacific Ocean was with two passports, but China’s citizenship law doesn’t allow dual nationality. In many cases, individuals acquired citizenship in the United States or elsewhere and held onto their Chinese passports without informing the government. This practice was particularly common among celebrities, but in the last few years, Chinese actors, singers, and sports stars faced pressure to abandon their foreign nationality amid growing xenophobia.
Gu has avoided questions about whether she’s given up her U.S. citizenship to acquire a Chinese passport. Under the law, this should have happened. But Gu knows that she would face even harsher criticism in the United States if she gave up her passport. If the Chinese authorities agreed to a special deal to let her keep it—as I suspect—she would also face backlash from the Chinese public.
The harsh words leveled at Gu by many U.S. commentators also speak to the change in perception of those living in both countries. Imagine an equivalent figure at the Beijing Summer Olympics 14 years ago: The 2008 Gu may have become a symbol of the two countries’ growing closeness. Instead, the Chinese public and press are using her to bash the West again while members of the Western press and public see her as a traitor.