On the Anniversary of Tiananmen, an Olympic Champion's Father Tells Congress How Beijing's Spies Tracked His Family on American Soil

Father of Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu testifies how Chinese agents hunted his family in California — one case in a campaign that a new report says Beijing runs worldwide.

WASHINGTON — Thirty-seven years to the day after Chinese tanks rolled into Beijing, Arthur Liu sat before a congressional commission in Washington and described the existential fear he had escaped in 1989 — and the moment it chilled him to the bone again, as he boarded a flight with his teenage daughter while she prepared for the Olympics.

“As we were boarding our flight, I received a telephone call from the FBI,” Liu told the commission. “The agent informed me that the spy was on his way to our home. I will never forget that moment.”

Liu, the father of American gold medalist Alysa Liu, was the most prominent witness at a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China devoted to transnational repression — the technical term for the way Chinese agents and their proxies hunt and harass, on foreign soil, the people the Communist Party fears.

The hearing’s co-chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, opened by casting cases like Liu’s not as isolated incidents but as facets of a single strategy.

“We see that strategy in scam networks stealing from US citizens, fentanyl poisoning our cities, PRC-linked land purchases near military installations, efforts to corrupt politicians and elections, steal private personnel and biometric data, and intellectual-property theft from businesses and universities,” Smith said. “These may look like separate problems. But they share a common purpose: exploit our openness, gather leverage, weaken our institutions, spread propaganda, and make Americans pay a price for standing up to Beijing.”

The story of Liu and his daughter, each becoming a primary threat and target for Beijing in different arenas, is so far outside the bounds of chance that it demands explicit framing.

Arthur Liu was a student leader in southern China during the Tiananmen crackdown who, by his own account, became one of the most wanted democracy activists before he escaped to Hong Kong, arrived in the United States as a refugee and built a career as an immigration lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His daughter became one of the finest figure skaters of her generation — and, in the months before the 2022 Beijing Games, a person of interest to the Chinese state. It was believed at the time that Beijing had eyed Alysa as a prospect for its drive to naturalize foreign-born athletes for those Games, the same campaign that brought the San Francisco–born freestyle skier Eileen Gu to compete, and win gold, for China.

Testifying before the commission, Liu recounted for the public the counterintelligence investigation that he says protected him and his daughter, and the years of targeting that surrounded it.