Eileen Gu: Profit Over Principle
The face of a narcissistic, values-free attitude.
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Eileen Gu is the face of a nihilistic, values-free attitude that puts narcissistic pursuit of profit above everything else.
An American skier born in San Francisco, Gu first became famous when she debuted at the 2022 Beijing Olympics on the Chinese team. At the recent Milan games, Gu faced tough questions about the actions of China’s one-party, authoritarian regime, which she dodged.
“I need to have a ton of evidence,” the 22-year-old Olympian told a Time Magazine reporter who asked about the communist government’s well-documented genocide of Uyghur Muslims.
“It’s irresponsible to ask me to be the mouthpiece of any agenda,” Gu went on to say.
But when an American chooses to play for the Chinese team they are acting as the mouthpiece for an agenda. Dictators have used sports to burnish their reputations going all the way back to the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin and beyond. To be an American on Team CCP is to willingly support that effort. Eileen Gu lends a human face to an ugly system.
I have the honor of working with brave Uyghur, Chinese, and Hong Kong dissidents. I have heard firsthand accounts of the abuses Gu is covering for. Listening to Gu’s denials and deflections is all the more infuriating because she and I actually share a lot of things in common (though I’ll admit Olympic-level athletic ability is not one of them).
Our parallel backgrounds have me thinking a lot about her character.
Eileen Gu and I are both first-generation Americans born to parents who experienced communist dictatorship; Gu’s mother is from China, while my parents came from the Soviet Union. We both retained an affinity for our parents’ cultures. Gu speaks fluent Mandarin and grew up traveling to China. I am fluent in Russian and spent many of my childhood summers visiting Russia. Gu’s mother clearly prioritized education, and I am sure she was overjoyed when her daughter enrolled at Stanford. I will always remember my immigrant parents’ excitement when my Yale acceptance letter arrived in the mail.
This is where the similarities end. If I opted to represent modern Russia in any capacity, I think my family would disown me. Yet Gu wears her affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party regime with pride.
Nothing suggests that Eileen Gu joined the Chinese team because she is a committed Marxist (though to be fair, neither are the CCP bosses who pay her). She is clearly proud of her Chinese heritage, but she is no uber-nationalist—you won’t hear Gu saber rattling on social media about reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. This isn’t an endorsement of communism or Chinese ultra-nationalism, but if Eileen Gu subscribed to either of these ideologies, at least we would know that she believed in something bigger than herself.
So what motivates Gu? Why did she, an American–born and raised in freedom–forfeit her ability to speak openly in order to represent the Chinese Communist Party?
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As far as I can tell, the answer is simple: fame and money. One Chinese government agency paid Gu millions of dollars directly, and she earned millions more from sponsorships. Competing for China gave her access to a huge market—Gu has become the face of over 20 brands in the People’s Republic. All told, Eileen Gu raked in $23 million last year, making her the highest-paid Winter Olympic athlete and the fourth highest-paid female athlete on the planet.
Being successful is not a crime. Success is a virtue to many immigrant families, including my own. Yet my parents also tempered raw ambition by teaching me the values of freedom and personal integrity.
Gu, by contrast, seems to have become fixated on eking out ever more money in exchange for whitewashing Chinese human rights abuses—call it the marginal value of moral compromise. Worst of all, she wasn’t faced with a choice between poverty and comfort. There is no question that an intelligent, driven person with a prestigious degree and world-class athletic talent like Eileen Gu could easily find success without selling out to a repressive police state. Perhaps she wouldn’t enjoy $23 million-a-year success, but she would still likely earn millions every year. Yet she made the decision that being even richer was worth making herself a cog in a massive authoritarian machine.
The same can be said of Gu’s sponsors and boosters—especially American media outlets that ran puff pieces about Gu and the Western companies who have deployed her for product endorsements and modeling. There are plenty of people who could have been suitable spokespeople for those firms and whose work does not directly benefit Chinese propaganda. Perhaps marketing departments and teams of PR consultants determined that Eileen Gu was the best representative for the brands, but we are once again talking about a minor difference in profit in exchange for major ethical concessions. It’s the same profit-first, amoral outlook that drives someone like Jeff Bezos to ping pong from supporting Black Lives Matter and making multi-million dollar donations to social justice organizations to funding Trumpworld. Athletes and business leaders don’t have to be activists to have something resembling a moral core.
Gu tries to wriggle out of all of this by saying that she is “carrying the weight of two nations.” I’m a Russian-speaking American Jew with a Hebrew name whose parents came from Moscow and Kyiv—I understand that immigrant identity can be… messy. There are over five million Chinese Americans. Surely many feel an emotional attachment to their culture—perhaps even the weight of two nations. Yet only a handful have ever represented the Chinese Communist Party in any capacity. Some Chinese American athletes have even resisted regime pressure to compete under the red flag of the People’s Republic. US figure skating champion Alysa Liu rebuffed Beijing’s advances. Chinese agents responded with a surveillance campaign, resulting in the FBI getting involved. At the 2022 Beijing Games, another American athlete, Nathan Chen, faced backlash on Chinese social media for criticizing the CCP.
Some have responded to criticism of Gu by pointing out that non-Americans have joined Team USA, while Americans like Zoe Atkin play for the British with little criticism. “Remarkably, no one is accusing [Atkin] of ‘betraying’ the United States in the exact same way,” wrote author Freddie deBoer “because we don’t have a relentless anti-UK propaganda apparatus in this country and because Great Britain is a majority white, English-speaking military ally of the United States.”
Cut through the pseudoacademic fluff of DeBoer’s defense and you’ll find there’s a world of difference between Britain’s or America’s flawed democracy and China’s authoritarian government. Despite Donald Trump’s best efforts, American athletes can still call out their leaders. British Olympians are free to do the same. (Gu did weigh in on Trump’s attacks against US skier Hunter Hess, literally acting out the old Soviet joke that Americans are free to criticize the president of the United States and the subjects of communist regimes are free to do the same.)
No one is demanding that Eileen Gu become a dissident—no American is obligated to speak out on the affairs of any country. But Gu is not silent: when she wraps herself in the flag of an authoritarian regime, lends it her fame, and cashes its checks, she is speaking loudly enough.
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"when an American chooses to play for the Chinese team they are acting as the mouthpiece for an agenda. Dictators have used sports to burnish their reputations going all the way back to the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin and beyond. To be an American on Team CCP is to willingly support that effort. Eileen Gu lends a human face to an ugly system."
Simple truth.
I saw the NBC piece about her where she was dashing between modeling shoots, class, and practice, thinking: why? Why would they glamorize her? They wasted airtime on her, when they could have focused on an American or one of our European friends racing against our team, like maybe a Ukrainian.