Hazel eyes and light hair, Eileen Gu never leaves her wide smile, playing with the cameras and making hearts with her fingers in Californian poses. At the antipodes of the Chinese athletes who are generally cold and distant with the media. Logical, since the 18-year-old young woman, who took Chinese nationality in 2019, was born in San Francisco (to an American father and a Chinese mother) and grew up in the United States.
The Chinese press has nicknamed the “snow princess” the one who is the charm of Beijing at the Winter Olympics. A prize of war which offered China its first gold medal in history in freestyle skiing events, blowing up the servers of the Chinese social network Weibo where it has nearly 4 million subscribers.
On the public television channels CCTV, it is omnipresent both on the sets and in advertising screens, where it already represents around twenty national brands including Bank of China and China Mobile. She would have accumulated a fortune already estimated according to CBN Data at more than 30 million euros over the past two years.
Political recovery
More focused on political symbols than on sporting exploits, the state press welcomes this return of Eileen to the motherland, proof according to her of the end of the American dream and “source of inspiration for parents”, according to the very nationalistic Global times. Because Eileen Gu is one of the rare athletes of this level to have abandoned her American nationality to evolve under the colors of the People’s Republic.
Beyond political recovery, she embodies a certain Chinese aristocracy fed at the prestigious American universities Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, taking the best of both worlds and ignoring different policies. “I am American when I am in the United States, Chinese when I am in China,” said Eileen Gu during a press conference in the United States before her departure for Beijing.
Her mother, Yan Gu, is the daughter of a senior Chinese government official. Coming to the United States to pursue higher education, she then worked for investment banks before embarking on venture capital in California and in particular in San Francisco where she met Eileen’s father, an American about whom we know almost nothing except that he is a Harvard graduate.
Young Eileen took full advantage of her golden youth in both China and the United States, attending a very expensive private school in America and competing in math Olympiads in Beijing before gaining admission to Stanford University.
The privilege of traveling from San Francisco to Shanghai, from New York to Beijing is what many children of Communist Party leaders have in common, be it businessman Bo Guagua (son of former top leader Bo Xilai, disgraced in 2012) or even Chinese President Xi Jinping’s daughter, Xi Mingze, who both attended Harvard University.
Many young Chinese from the upper middle class also choose to study in the United States. In total, the Chinese represent a third of foreign students in the country of Uncle Sam: they are nearly 400,000. For them, there is no need to study Xi Jinping’s “thought” as is required in China.
Ideal Icon of Prosperous China
This elite of “Chinamerica” symbolizes the very special relations between the two greatest powers on the planet, beyond the rivalries and mutual distrust between Washington and Beijing. They have nothing to do with the poor immigrants of the early 20th century: they embody a new Chinese aristocracy making the big difference between capitalism and communism.
In the United States, Eileen’s mother was able to raise her child on her own without encountering legal difficulties. Single parenthood was illegal in China until 1997, and it is still difficult to be a single mother there not only because of the social stigma, but also because of the fines and punishments imposed on those who have children outside marriage. the difficulty of obtaining legal certificates for her children and even enrolling them in school.
That’s why the Olympic freestyle champion’s triumph goes far beyond her smile. It undoubtedly embodies a dream that many Chinese feel deprived of. The Chinese magazine Caixin has also published an article inviting its readers to reflect on the symbol it represents. Her success is beyond the reach of ordinary Chinese, writes the newspaper, which goes so far as to imply that the champion has retained dual nationality in defiance of Chinese laws, which prohibit it. The communist regime censored this article on the web, retaining Eileen Gu only as the return home of an ideal icon of prosperous China.