The Instrumentalization of Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu in the New Cold War
The Instrumentalization of Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu in the New Cold War
Badiucao drew it in two panels. In one, Alysa Liu skates triumphantly beside the Statue of Liberty. In the other, Eileen Gu is wrapped in a bloodstained yuan note, Mao Zedong's face looming over her shoulder. The caption: "In a world of Eileen Gu, be Alysa Liu." The cartoon spread widely during the Milan-Cortina Games in February 2026, shared by politicians and media figures as a piece of self-evident moral instruction. Vice President JD Vance told Fox News [1] he expected athletes raised in the United States to compete for the country that had given them everything. A Tennessee congressman proposed a 100% tax on the earnings [2] of US-born athletes who competed for "adversary nations." The sport had vanished. What remained was pure politics, and two young women whose bodies had been conscripted into a rivalry that predated their births.
That cartoon is the most honest entry point into what happened here: not a theory but a documented artifact. And the athlete whom American media cast as Gu's moral counterweight publicly refused the role assigned to her. In an interview with the New York Times [3], Alysa Liu called the discourse "hypocritical" and described comparisons between the two as "ridiculous, we're both half Chinese." Any serious analysis of this episode has to begin with that refusal. The instrument rejected the handle.
The Symmetry the Meme Erased
The facts resist the binary framing imposed on them. Both athletes were born in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both have a parent from China. Both are products of the same American athletic infrastructure. At Milan-Cortina, both won Olympic gold [4]: Liu, at 20, took the women's individual figure skating title, the first American woman to do so in 24 years, while Gu defended her halfpipe crown and added two silvers [5], finishing the Games as the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history with six career medals. By any athletic measure, these are two peaks of the same mountain.
The difference the media chose to amplify, their flag selection, is real, complex, and rooted in genuinely distinct family histories. What is not real is the interpretive weight the American press and political class loaded onto that difference: the entirety of a geopolitical rivalry collapsed onto a single biographical choice. As Columbia College Chicago professor Richard King argued [6], media coverage framed the two athletes as archetypes of the "good immigrant" and the "bad immigrant," a binary that flattened the complexity of both women's lives into a political utility map. That the disproportionality is structural rather than incidental is demonstrated by the precise selectivity of its operation: dual-national athletes who represent European states through family heritage generate no congressional proposals, no presidential accusations of betrayal. The mechanism activates along specific geopolitical and racial coordinates.
The "Model Minority" Machine
The "good immigrant / bad immigrant" binary that King identifies is not a recent invention. It is the operational logic of what historians call the model minority myth: the ideological construction traceable in American political culture since at least the Cold War, in which certain immigrant groups are selectively celebrated not for their intrinsic worth but for their usefulness as a demonstration that the American system works, and as an implicit rebuke to groups deemed insufficiently grateful or assimilated. The myth is not descriptive. It is prescriptive.
What the coverage of Liu and Gu makes visible is that the myth functions as a class mechanism within the communities it appears to celebrate, not only as a racial mechanism directed outward. A professional-managerial stratum concentrated in law, medicine, finance, and technology has a material stake in selective assimilation and actively produces the discourse of the "good immigrant," because that discourse ratifies its own position. This stratum is not deceived by the ideology; it participates in its production. When American media and politicians deploy Arthur Liu's story, they draw on this stratum's self-narration and present it as representative of Chinese-American experience in its entirety.
Arthur Liu's family history carries genuine moral weight. A student activist sought by the Chinese government after the 1989 protests [7], he fled to the United States, became a lawyer, and raised five children as a single parent. Before the 2022 Beijing Games, the FBI informed the family they were targets of a Chinese government harassment and espionage operation [8]; the State Department secured protection for the athlete, who was then sixteen. These facts are not in dispute. But Arthur Liu is also a successful Silicon Valley attorney. He occupies a specific class position, defined by professional capital, access to American legal and political institutions, and a trajectory that bears no resemblance to the lived reality of the vast majority of Chinese immigrants in the United States. American media does not present him as a class subject with particular interests; it presents him as a universal symbol of the Chinese diaspora, which erases the heterogeneity of Chinese-American experience and collapses it into a single story of grateful rescue.
Memes shared by American politicians juxtaposed photos of the two athletes with the message "Be an Alysa Liu," [9] casting them as moral opposites in a civilizational clash. In this framing, Liu is not celebrated for her extraordinary skill on the ice, her reinvention after retirement, or the joyful, artist-first approach to competition that defined her entire comeback. She is celebrated because her victory confirms what American nationalism needed confirmed: that the United States remains the correct moral destination for people of Chinese descent. The welcome is conditional in its foundations, even when it presents itself as wholehearted.
Eileen Gu, by contrast, committed what one might call the heresy of autonomous cosmopolitanism. When she announced in 2019 that she would compete for China rather than the United States, she exercised exactly the kind of transnational mobility that globalized capitalism celebrates in virtually every other context [10], until that mobility put her on the wrong side of the Sino-American rivalry. The reaction was not proportional to the act. She received death threats, hate mail, and was physically assaulted on the Stanford campus [11]. A sitting vice president was asked on national television whether her choices were "treasonous." A congressman declared that anyone who works with a "foreign adversary" has betrayed the country and must be stripped of all benefits.
The disproportionality is the evidence. As Lehigh University professor Yinan He noted [12], the intensifying US-China rivalry has raised public expectations of national loyalty and sharply reduced tolerance for dual identities, but that dynamic operates selectively, activated by geopolitical anxiety and shaped by race. The accusation of "betrayal" presupposes that athletes of Chinese descent carry a particular obligation to prove American allegiance, an obligation not placed on their white counterparts. Racial surveillance dressed as patriotism: the mechanism by which the American state manages the ideological costs of racial diversity without disturbing the underlying distribution of power.
Ideology Doesn't Need a Censor
What the American media coverage of these Games exposed was not a symmetry between two nationalisms but something that cuts closer to the structure of liberal ideology itself. When American commentators called Gu a traitor for exercising the same transnational mobility that American capitalism exports as a virtue in virtually every other context, they did not borrow a foreign logic. They produced their own, from within the liberal-democratic apparatus, without coercion, without a Party directive. The ethnonationalism was homegrown.
This is not, however, a matter of cultural inertia or individual prejudice propagating without a social substrate. The media, Congress, and professional sport are not passive channels through which attitudes circulate; they are institutions that materialize the class interests of the American bourgeoisie, performing a function that requires no central coordination precisely because the function is structural. The ideological work gets done because the apparatus is built to do it. No one needed to issue the order. The order is built into the architecture.
The political economy beneath this superstructure deserves explicit identification. Eileen Gu's income derives primarily from contracts with Chinese and international luxury brands. Her body is capital in the literal sense: a site of investment, a bearer of brand value, a node in global marketing networks that operate across precisely the national borders that American politicians claim she violated. Alysa Liu's athletic infrastructure was constructed within the American system of private sponsorship and corporate investment in elite sport. The Sino-American rivalry that generated the discourse around both athletes is not a clash of values or civilizations, but neither is it a symmetrical competition between equivalent powers. American financial capitalism confronts, in China, something qualitatively different from a rival capitalist state: a socialist political formation organized under Communist Party leadership, in which the commanding heights of the economy remain under state ownership and in which development has been subordinated to collective social objectives rather than the extraction of private profit. That this model has produced results, the largest poverty elimination program in human history, the construction of technological sovereignty in semiconductors, renewable energy, and high-speed rail, the extension of public health infrastructure to populations that market mechanisms reliably abandon, makes China not merely a geopolitical competitor but an ideological challenge. If this model succeeds, the foundational premise of American hegemony, that liberal capitalism is the only social organization capable of generating development and prosperity, is falsified at scale. Sport is a theater of this confrontation. The bodies of two athletes from the San Francisco Bay Area are among its instruments.
The comparison between the two state apparatuses demands analytical precision that most commentary has not provided. The American apparatus operates through overdetermination: rather than suppressing Gu, it amplifies her specifically to manage her meaning. A six-medal Olympian who refused to explain herself to American nationalism was repackaged, in real time, as a betrayal narrative. The Chinese apparatus operates through suppression: Liu's media presence on Chinese platforms is effectively nonexistent, a direct consequence of her father's role in a history the regime cannot acknowledge without delegitimizing itself [13]. One mechanism suppresses; the other overdetermines. They are distinct instruments in the service of distinct state interests.
But the analysis cannot stop at cataloguing technique. The question a materialist analysis requires is which apparatus occupies the offensive position in this rivalry and which the defensive one.
The American state is the hegemonic power of global financial capitalism. Its ideological apparatus naturalizes a specific form of class domination as universal freedom, exports it as a model, and deploys ethnic loyalty tests as a tool for managing the costs of racial diversity within its own borders. It has never confronted the kind of sustained external pressure that would force a choice between ideological openness and organizational survival.
The intensity of the American reaction to Eileen Gu, the death threats, the congressional proposals, the vice-presidential interventions, is not proportional to any actual security stakes involved in one athlete's flag selection. It is proportional to an ideological anxiety that runs considerably deeper: the possibility that a young woman educated in America, with every option the system claims to offer, could look at what China has built and conclude, without coercion, without naivety, that it was worth representing. That possibility is intolerable to a media apparatus whose function includes constructing the Chinese developmental model as self-evidently inferior, totalitarian, and illegitimate. The ferocity directed at Gu is the measure of what her choice threatens to demonstrate. American media coverage of China in this period is not primarily informational. It is the ideological management of a challenge that cannot be answered on material grounds, because on material grounds the challenge is real.
The Chinese state has operated under that pressure since its founding. The People's Republic was established after a century of imperial humiliation, civil war, and Japanese occupation. It fought the United States to a standstill on the Korean peninsula. It endured decades of economic embargo and diplomatic isolation. And it studied with considerable attention the dissolution of the Soviet Union: a state that was not defeated militarily, but through systematic ideological erosion, through the funding of internal opposition, the construction of a legitimacy crisis, the infiltration of liberal-democratic values into party structures until those structures could no longer reproduce themselves. Whether one accepts the CPC's reading of that history, the reading is not paranoid. It is grounded in documented operations: National Endowment for Democracy activities in Tiananmen-era Beijing, CIA-backed destabilization campaigns throughout the socialist world, the explicit American strategic doctrine of "peaceful evolution" as a mechanism for dismantling socialist states from within.
This context does not place Chinese ideological control beyond critique. It makes it analytically incoherent to treat that control as equivalent to American ideological control, since the two operate from opposite positions in the global hierarchy of power. One is the instrument of an aggressor state managing the costs of dominance. The other is the instrument of a state under siege managing the costs of survival. Treating them as equivalent, even in the name of "criticizing both sides," reproduces the imperial framing that places the burden of justification on the socialist state while naturalizing the operations of the capitalist state as universal norm.
Arthur Liu's story clarifies the asymmetry without simplifying it. His persecution was real. The harassment operation targeting his family, the FBI warnings, the forced exile: these are documented facts. But the 1989 movement from which he emerged was not ideologically homogeneous. It contained genuine popular democratic currents alongside explicitly pro-market currents connected to external networks with concrete interests in opening China to Western capital. The NED had active operations in Beijing during that period. That conjunction does not invalidate anyone's suffering. It prevents the use of that suffering as self-evident proof of which side operates with clean hands, and it prevents the story of one Silicon Valley attorney, exceptional by any class measure, from standing as universal testimony for the Chinese diaspora.
The Limits of Individual Refusal
Gu responded to Vance's comments with relaxed irony [16]: "Thanks, JD! That's sweet," and then went to Italy and became the greatest freestyle skier in Olympic history. When asked at a press conference whether two silver medals represented "two golds lost," she replied [17]: "I'm the most decorated female freeskier in history. I think that's an answer in and of itself." She kept competing, kept winning, kept refusing the silence that would have made her more convenient.
Liu's refusal was different in form but equal in significance. She called the critics hypocrites directly [18], pointed out that those telling Gu to "go back to China" were the same type of people who had always told Chinese Americans to go back to China, and observed that sport requires no ideological passport. The woman whose victory was being used as a weapon against Gu declined to be a weapon.
These refusals are real and they matter as evidence. They establish that both athletes understood the operation being conducted over their shoulders and chose to say so, publicly and precisely. That the two most instrumentalized figures in this episode demonstrated greater analytical clarity about what was happening to them than most of the media covering them is worth documenting.
But the significance has limits that optimistic readings of this episode have consistently overstated. The ideological machinery did not stop. The congressman's tax proposal continued to advance. The media framing continued to operate. The vice president continued to give interviews. Individual refusal, however clear-eyed, does not dismantle the apparatus that generates the demand for compliance. Gu's irony and Liu's directness register the gap between the function assigned to them and the persons they are. That gap marks a site. It is not a solution.
To conclude here, on individual subjects articulating awareness of the game being played at their expense, is a concession to liberal idealism: the premise that the conscious subject can subvert structure through the force of refusal. The structure continued. What it could not entirely assimilate were two people who refused to perform the roles written for them. That refusal is necessary. It is insufficient.
The model minority myth is designed to prevent exactly the kind of solidarity that would make those assigned roles unavailable. It operates by offering conditional inclusion to a racialized subgroup in exchange for that subgroup's participation, implicit or explicit, in the subordination of others. It fragments the communities it appears to celebrate. The counter to that operation is not individual subjects who see through it. It is the collective organization of the workers, students, and immigrants whose interests are structurally opposed to the class fraction that benefits from the myth's reproduction, regardless of ethnic origin.
The consciousness that Gu and Liu demonstrated about the game being played at their expense is necessary. It is not sufficient. The conditions that make this game possible, American imperialism's drive to contain a socialist developmental model that falsifies its own premises, the commodification of athletic bodies, the function of ethnic nationalism in managing immigrant labor, do not yield to individual refusal. They yield to the organized politics of the communities that individual refusal alone cannot constitute.
References
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/sport/eileen-gu-china-us-controversy-winter-olympics-intl-hnk
[2] https://fortune.com/2026/03/10/eileen-gu-and-alysa-liu-2-olympians-2-californians-2-countries/
[3] https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2026/03/10/olympians-liu-and-gu-travel-very-different-paths-and-china-us-relations-hang-over-their-stories/
[4] https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/alysa-liu-wins-olympic-gold-2026-milan-cortina-games
[5] https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/eileen-gu-defends-halfpipe-gold-leaves-milan-cortina-3-medals
[6] https://www.visiontimes.com/2026/02/15/eileen-gu-and-alysa-liu-at-the-center-of-a-growing-us-china-identity-clash-at-the-2026-winter-olympics.html
[7] https://dnyuz.com/2026/03/02/in-alysa-liu-and-eileen-gu-china-and-america-see-a-mirror-image/
[8] https://dnyuz.com/2026/03/02/in-alysa-liu-and-eileen-gu-china-and-america-see-a-mirror-image/
[9] https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/06/social-media-eileen-gu-s-traitor-chinatown-ll-welcomed-as-daughter/
[10] https://www.foxnews.com/sports/controversial-skier-eileen-gu-settles-silver-after-defending-gold-medal-bid-falls-short-milan
[11] https://www.olympics.com/en/milano-cortina-2026/news/winter-olympics-2026-eileen-gu-best-slopestyle-ever-done-silver-medal
[12] https://www.visiontimes.com/2026/02/15/eileen-gu-and-alysa-liu-at-the-center-of-a-growing-us-china-identity-clash-at-the-2026-winter-olympics.html
[13] https://dnyuz.com/2026/03/02/in-alysa-liu-and-eileen-gu-china-and-america-see-a-mirror-image/
[14] https://www.visiontimes.com/2026/02/12/two-paths-on-ice-alysa-liu-and-eileen-gu-reflect-diverging-choices-for-chinese-american-athletes.html
[15] https://dnyuz.com/2026/03/02/in-alysa-liu-and-eileen-gu-china-and-america-see-a-mirror-image/
[16] https://fortune.com/2026/03/10/eileen-gu-and-alysa-liu-2-olympians-2-californians-2-countries/
[17] https://sg.news.yahoo.com/alysa-liu-stands-eileen-gu-232012466.html
[18] https://www.unilad.com/celebrity/news/alysa-liu-defends-eileen-gu-olympics-represent-china-400328-20260311