Freestyle Skiing Gold Medalist Representing China Draws Heat For Abandoning U.S. Citizenship

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 US citizenship to do so, James Palmer wrote for Foreign Policy.

Photo Insert: Chinese American freestyle skier Eileen Gu recently won gold at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

Gu, 18, 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. This week, Chinese social media were briefly consumed by 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 said he was not Gu’s father but had dated her mother when Gu was young and remains friends with her.

Gu 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 US for postgraduate studies and later worked first for investment banks in the US and as a venture capitalist between California and China.

She’s part of the so-called Chimerican elite.

Growing up, Eileen Gu enjoyed the power of wealth in both China and the US, attending a very expensive private school in the US and taking math Olympiad classes in Beijing before getting into Stanford University.

The privilege 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.

This 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.

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