Eileen Gu (born in the US) is the symbol of a new class of Chinese athletes, but one misstep could bring her down

Hong Kong (CNN) — At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the face of China’s sporting dreams is undeniably American.

Freestyle skier Eileen Gu’s rise to the top has been meteoric, with her popularity in China soaring in the run-up to the Games. “Snow princess Gu Ailing is ready to shine at her country’s Olympic Games,” read a headline in state media Xinhua, referring to Gu by her Chinese name.

But Gu, 18, has another home: the United States, where he was born to a Chinese mother and an American father, and where he discovered his love for the sport. In 2015, just months after taking her first World Cup podium finish, the San Francisco native announced her decision to compete for China over the United States, a controversial decision that put her firmly in the spotlight. .

“It was an incredibly difficult decision to make,” he wrote then in a instagram post. “I am proud of my heritage, and equally proud of my American upbringing.”

Since then it has become a household name in China. As you walk the streets, you can see her face on billboards and magazine covers. Promotional videos for the Olympics show Gu doing tricks in the air and running up the Great Wall. He has nearly two million followers on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, as well as multiple Chinese sponsors, brand deals and documentary crews that follow his every move.

But behind its success is the strong pressure of being both Chinese and American at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions; to represent his mother’s homeland, a country criticized in the West for alleged human rights violations; and trying to be an athlete and nothing more during one of the most controversial Olympic Games in recent history.

She is not alone in walking this tightrope: The Beijing Olympics feature an unprecedented number of foreign-born athletes competing for China, many of them from the United States. Among them, Gu has become the poster child for an ambitious China, eager to show that it has the power to attract foreign talent and mold a new kind of Chinese athlete on the world stage.

But these athletes, especially those of Chinese descent, face an impossible balancing act in being between two countries and navigating the complexities of dual identity in the public eye.

an impossible position

More than a dozen athletes representing China at the Olympic Games were born abroad, and most of them are part of the men’s ice hockey team, in which only six of the 25 members They are nationals.

Actually, changing nationality for sports is quite common internationally, it’s just that China was late to the game, said Susan Brownell, a Chinese sports expert at the University of Missouri-St. The change is especially unusual, as China is a very homogeneous country and has some of the strictest immigration regulations in the world. “China has never done anything like this,” Brownell added.

There are many Caucasian faces involved, with no Chinese ethnicity or obvious ties to the country, such as former NHL players Jake Chelios and Jeremy Smith. But it is athletes of Chinese descent who are under the most scrutiny, such as Canadian-born hockey player Brandon Yip and American-born ice skater Zhu Yi, formerly known as Beverly Zhu.

Zhu’s disappointing Olympic debut served to illustrate the unique pressures these athletes face. After she fell on the ice and placed last in the women’s short program team event, Chinese social media erupted in contempt for the 19-year-old figure skater.

On Weibo, the hashtag “Zhu Yi fell” gained 200 million views in a few hours. Many wondered why Zhu had been chosen for the team instead of a Chinese-born athlete, while others criticized his hesitant Mandarin. “This is a shame,” read one comment with 11,000 votes.

Gu and Zhu are mirror images in many ways — both were born in California and only a year apart — but Gu has wowed audiences with his fluent Mandarin and familiarity with Chinese culture, receiving little of the Chinese skepticism he pursues. to Zhou.

On Monday, Gu advanced to the Big Air final in her first qualifying event, after the announcer introduced her as the “favorite” and caused an outcry from the crowd. But it’s unclear whether that adulation will continue if Gu doesn’t get the gold medals expected of her.

And Gu’s fame brings its own challenges. She has been called “America’s ungrateful daughter” by Fox News, a sentiment frequently found in her social media posts, as well as those of hockey players such as Chelios.

“It’s good to see you taking all your successes and achievements from the US to China and not representing the place where you were born and raised,” one commenter wrote under one of Gu’s Instagram posts last week.

Some have accused her of putting profit and prestige before taking a stand on human rights, and critics especially point to the high-level sponsorships he has secured in China. The United States is leading a diplomatic boycott of the Games, citing alleged human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang region, about which Gu has remained silent.

Through it all, Gu has tried to stay on a middle path. He creates social media content in both English and Chinese, posts photos from Shanghai and California, pranks American audiences on TikTok while starring in Chinese-language documentaries on the Chinese mainland.

“When I’m in China, I’m Chinese. When I’m in America, I’m American,” Gu told Olympic Channel at the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games.

Last week, he alluded to this dual identity in a caption on Instagram. “Having been introduced to the sport growing up in America, I wanted to encourage Chinese skiers in the same way that my American role models inspired me,” she wrote.

But as much as she wants to express both sides of her heritage and stay out of politics, the world doesn’t seem to let her.

And China’s acceptance of Gu also reflects its uncompromising view of nationality, which has become more insular and forceful under President Xi Jinping: either you’re Chinese or you’re not.

The Citizenship Debate

The citizenship question hangs over Gu, and over many of the foreign-born athletes.

China does not allow dual nationality, and in recent years the government has cracked down and encouraged people to report people who secretly hold two passports. There are very few exceptions to the ban, and it is highly unlikely that any of these exceptional circumstances would apply to the athletes in question, said Donald Clarke, a George Washington University Law School professor specializing in Chinese law.

“The only way hockey players could become Chinese citizens is by naturalizing, and under China’s nationality law, they have to give up their foreign citizenship,” Clarke told CNN. The same goes for Gu.

But it is not clear if that has been fulfilled. Gu has never shared publicly whether he gave up his US citizenship to compete for China, and speculation increased after he request the US Presidential Scholarship Program in 2021, which is only open to US citizens or permanent residents. The official site of the Olympic Games appeared to confirm their status in a january article which referred to Gu’s “dual nationality”.

Both Clarke and Brownell said China has most likely made an exception to its own rules to allow foreign-born athletes to hold two passports, in hopes of bolstering their Olympic medal tally, which the Chinese government has long touted. as a sign of national strength.

This strategy could be “an experiment by the leadership, who will judge the reaction of the public before deciding whether to go ahead with the practice on a larger scale and allow dual nationality for athletes,” Brownell said.

Chinese authorities have carefully avoided the question of Gu’s nationality, emphasizing his Chinese heritage. She is what the government often calls “Overseas Chinese,” meaning foreign nationals of Chinese descent, who are given that label regardless of their citizenship or how many generations of their family have lived abroad.

Since Xi took office, he has repeatedly claimed that overseas Chinese also belong to the nation, and has repeatedly vowed to “unite overseas Chinese” with their relatives in China as part of the “Chinese dream.”

It seems that Gu is part of that Chinese dream, as the government and its propaganda machine rush to present her as their own.

“I have very deep roots in China,” Gu told state broadcaster CCTV, according to the state-run nationalist tabloid. Global Times. He added that he had been in China when it was announced that the Winter Games would be held in Beijing, and that’s when “I started thinking about competing for China.”

In an article, Xinhua He noted that Gu visited Beijing every summer in his childhood, that he watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics from the stands, and that he loves Peking duck and dumplings.

Gu “should be an idol for the whole world,” declared a Chinese fan at the Global Times. “Before people wanted to be American, why not accept that people want to be Chinese now?”