OPINION:
As a parent of a teenager born and raised free in America, I watched the stories of athletes Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu unfold at the Winter Olympics with more than casual interest.
Both young women were born and raised in the United States. Both are extraordinarily talented. Both were brought up by demanding, ambitious parents. Yet their careers have come to symbolize two very different ideas about freedom, identity and what success really means.
This isn’t just about sports. It’s about choice. It’s about the kind of country one chooses to represent and the kind of life one chooses to live.
Ms. Gu was born, educated and trained in the United States. She benefited from the freedoms America provides: constitutional protections, open debate and an environment that nurtures independent thinking. Yet she chose to compete for communist China, a one-party state where citizenship is tightly controlled, dissent is punished, and individual rights exist at the pleasure of the government.
In America, Ms. Gu can criticize society openly without fear of state retaliation. In China, public disagreement with official narratives carries consequences. That asymmetry is not theoretical but structural.
When she dismisses concerns about human rights abuses or attributes criticism solely to anti-China sentiment, it feels less like open dialogue and more like alignment with state messaging. That contrast is hard to ignore.
This debate isn’t about random nationality switching in sports. Athletes change national representation all the time.
The question is what the chosen nation represents. History offers stark examples. Refugees who fled Nazi Germany did not later choose to represent Adolf Hitler’s regime. Iranian American female athletes rarely opt to compete for a system that oppresses women.
Representation is never just logistical; it also carries moral and political symbolism.
Also at work is a broader mentality, often associated with the Chinese Communist Party, that ethnicity or cultural heritage entails political obligation and ideological allegiance.
Anyone of Chinese descent, the logic suggests, should ultimately serve the strategic interests of Beijing. Ms. Liu refused that premise.
Ms. Liu chose to compete for the United States. In doing so, she was targeted by the CCP government agents on American soil and online by nationalist critics who viewed her decision as a betrayal. The reaction itself illustrates the mindset: identity as ownership, rather than identity as choice.
Parenting provides another revealing contrast.
Both Ms. Gu and Ms. Liu were raised by strong, driven parents. Both were pushed hard. Yet the trajectories diverge in a critical way. In Ms. Gu’s case, her career appears tightly aligned with her mother’s long-term vision: athletic excellence intertwined with branding, global endorsement and national symbolism. Ambition itself is not the problem.
The question is autonomy. When a child’s path appears seamlessly integrated into a parent’s strategic blueprint, it can be difficult to see where the child’s independent choice begins.
Ms. Liu’s story took a different turn. After early success and global attention, she stepped away from competitive skating at the height of her fame. She walked away from medals, sponsorships and momentum, and her father let her.
At that moment, her father shifted parenting from pressure to respect. That moment matters. It signaled that her life belonged to her, not to a parental dream, a national narrative or a commercial enterprise. When she eventually returned to competition, she did so on her own terms.
The psychological dimension was visible on the ice.
Ms. Gu often skated under immense pressure, not only as an elite athlete but also as a symbol carrying state expectations and multimillion-dollar endorsement contracts. Performance becomes heavier when it carries the weight of national prestige and commercial obligation. Ms. Liu, by contrast, skated with a palpable sense of joy. She seemed free from parental overreach, from national grandiosity, from financial calculation.
She competed not as a geopolitical emblem but as an athlete in love with her sport. When she stood on the podium and the “Star-Spangled Banner” played, her seriousness reflected something deeper than victory. It was a quiet affirmation of the freedom that made her path possible.
Watching Ms. Gu receive gold while China’s national anthem played felt different. She is, in every practical sense, a product of American opportunity: American training, American institutions, American liberty. Yet on that podium, she stood as a symbol of a system fundamentally opposed to the freedoms that shaped her. The dissonance was striking.
In the end, the divide between these two athletes is philosophical.
One path prizes gold, fame and geopolitical symbolism. The other prizes autonomy: the right to pause, question, step away and return freely.
One measures success in contracts and medals. The other measures it in ownership of one’s own life.
A truly successful upbringing does not merely produce champions. It also produces free human beings. The real test of love is not how high a child climbs but whether they are free to choose the mountain.
For that reason, my admiration rests with Ms. Liu and her father. Their story reflects something profoundly American: that individual freedom is not an abstraction but a lived reality. In the long run, that freedom will be the greatest victory of all.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
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