When champion skier Eileen Gu (谷愛凌) was a 12-year-old American high school student she gave an impassioned speech against stereotyping women as “motherly caregivers.” She urged girls to fight the gender pay gap.
“People aren’t accepting that women can be what they want to be yet,” Gu said to the student assembly at her US$40,000-a-year all-girls private school in San Francisco. “I encourage you all to step out of your comfort zone and show the boys we’re just as powerful as they are.”
As Beijing basks in the US-born athlete’s Winter Olympics victory for China in the big air jump event last week, that speech has been widely shared on the microblogging service Sina Weibo with one post attracting 50,000 likes.
“She is really a great idol for teenagers,” one user wrote. “Let’s work together to become a better version of ourselves,” another said. “It’s still not too late for us to fight.”
In China, where the Chinese Communist Party guards against any popular cause beyond its control, there is little room for movements promoting gender equality.
Tennis ace Peng Shuai’s (彭帥) allegations of mistreatment by a former vice premier were wiped by censors last year, the nascent #MeToo movement has been quashed by authorities and there is just one woman in the party’s 25-member politburo — she looks set to retire this year.
Gu has done much at the games that should sit favorably with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government.
She has said that Peng was “happy and healthy,” despite the Women’s Tennis Association’s repeated concerns for her safety, dodged commenting on US allegations of genocide in Xinjiang, and shot pointed comebacks at critics of her decision to join Team China, dismissing them as “uneducated” and unlikely to “win the Olympics.”
She would likely have more moments in the spotlight before the Olympics are over, since she is still expected to compete in the halfpipe and slopestyle events.
“Gu has a huge platform in China that’s conditioned on her not deviating from official positions on anything, including on women’s issues,” said Yaqiu Wang (王亞秋), senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch. “True women’s empowerment inherently runs against state control.”
After Gu became the first Chinese woman to win gold in a Winter Olympics snow event, the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times said the 18-year-old was “like most other new-era Chinese teens” who love social media, fancy food, travel and fashion.
The reality is somewhat different.
For a start, most Chinese teenagers cannot access Instagram, the Western social media site blocked in China where Gu has about 950,000 followers. When that was pointed out to Gu on the platform, she responded in a now-deleted post by saying that “anyone can download a vpn,” which is illegal in China.
That disconnect between Gu’s lifestyle and the reality for millions of women across China was underscored by the story of a mentally disabled mother of eight discovered shackled to a hut in eastern China.
Outcry over how authorities initially failed to take action, and discussion of the known problem of trafficking women to be childbearing brides in rural China, caused outcry on Chinese social media as the US native triumphed.
Gu grew up shuttling between elite worlds in California and Beijing, as the daughter of an American father and venture capitalist Chinese mother who is the daughter of a senior government engineer.
Undercutting efforts to paint Gu as an average teen, the Global Times described her as a “prodigy” who won a place at Stanford University with a perfect SAT score.
“Gu’s open support for women’s empowerment in sports is welcome and may inspire some,” said Dong Yige (董一格), assistant professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Buffalo. “But few women enjoy all the privileges and resources that are the pre-condition for Gu becoming an Olympian — and a model and Stanford student at the same time, no less.”
While some celebrities in China have surrendered their foreign passports, including US ones, as fraying geopolitical ties between Beijing and Washington give rise to nationalism, Gu’s Western links have been touted by state media to highlight her decision to turn away from her birth nation.
On the back of that publicity, Gu has inked deals with a slew of major brands including Bank of China, Tiffany & Co, Louis Vuitton, online retailer JD.com, sportswear giant Anta and Chinese coffee chain Luckin Coffee.
That has made her a model for success in Xi’s system that has often forced multinationals to pick between being criticized in the West for ignoring rights abuses or losing access to a market of 1.4 billion increasingly wealthy people.
In 2019 — the year Gu joined Team China — Daryl Morey, former general manager of the US National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets, likely cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars by supporting democracy protests in Hong Kong.
“For some at least, Gu winning a gold for China instead of the US is seen as a slap in the face to Washington,” said Cara Wallis, associate professor at Texas A&M University, adding that her celebrity has nothing to do with women’s empowerment.
“Xi Jinping has a very blatant belief regarding women’s role in the family,” she added. “In essence, they’re caregivers and nurturers” — the stereotypes Gu denounced in the US.
The vitriol that flooded Chinese social media after Zhu Yi (朱易, formerly Beverly Zhu), a US-born figure skater who gave up her US citizenship to represent China, performed poorly in her Olympics debut illustrated how Gu’s platform as a foreign-born athlete is predicated on top success.
A preference for boys as a result of China’s one-child policy means the country has almost 35 million more men than women. Moves to encourage married couples to have three children has put new pressures on women, who already face discrimination around maternity leave in the workplace.
Women who have braved a patriarchal culture that often shames victims to speak out about sexual assault in the workplace have in the past few years been repeatedly silenced, as China cracks down on its #MeToo movement for being a vehicle for spreading liberal Western values.
“There has been a surge in misogyny and a more traditional patriarchal culture in recent years,” Dong said.
A post by soccer commentator Huang Jianxiang (黃健翔) put the pay gap in sports that Gu once rallied against in Chinese headlines last week. His call for the Chinese Football Association to make the women’s prize money double the men’s after the national women’s soccer team won the AFC Women’s Asian Cup, was liked 700,000 times on Sina Weibo.
For Gu’s part, there was still a sign of that idealistic 12-year-old Californian school girl as she accepted her gold medal in the frosty reaches of northern China. While her fellow Chinese medalist, speedskater Fan Kexin (范可新), followed protocol on the podium by first thanking her country, then a range of state officials, Gu took a more individualistic approach.
“I want to show what I’m capable of to the world,” Gu said in Chinese of her victory.
In English, she went a step further, saying she hoped the ambitious final trick that clinched her the gold would “hopefully encourage more girls to break their own boundaries.”
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