MILAN — Millions of people will watch Alysa Liu when the 20-year-old U.S. figure skater competes for a medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Can that be any more unnerving than being watched by Chinese spies?
In 2022, the U.S. Justice Department charged five men with acting on behalf of the Chinese government and targeting Chinese dissidents in the United States. The dissidents included Liu’s father, Arthur, who organized pro-Democracy protests in China before fleeing the country in 1989. And, according to her father, Alysa Liu was targeted too.
‘In a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I in some prank show? Is this world real?’ Alysa Liu said in October while discussing the matter at a Team USA media event in New York.
A man who claimed to be a US. Olympic official called Arthur Liu three months before Alysa Liu competed in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, he told USA TODAY Sports, and asked for faxed copies of their passports. Arthur Liu refused.
‘I felt something fishy was going on,’ he told the Associated Press in 2022.
Prosecutors said Matthew Ziburis, one of the five men arrested as a result of the investigation, was hired to perform surveillance on the Liu family, according to PBS.
In the criminal complaint filed by the Department of Justice, Arthur Liu told USA TODAY Sports, he is listed as ‘Dissident 3’ and Alysa Liu is listed as ‘family member.’ The Department of Justice did not respond to a USA Today Sports’ request for information.
Alysa Liu finished sixth at the 2022 Beijing Games and is in third place at the Milano Cortina Winter Games headed into the long program Thursday, Feb. 19, with her father’s history part of her own history.
‘I mean, it made sense to me from everything my dad did,’ Alysa Liu said in October of the Chinese spies.
Outrage after a massacre
Arthur said he’ll be traveling to the 2026 Winter Olympics with a group of 26 relatives and friends. There was a time where the only objective of travel was to maintain his safety.
In emails sent to USA TODAY Sports, Arthur described activities he said put him in danger.
In July 1989, Arthur said, he learned he was on a ‘most wanted’ list in Guangzhou while attending the Zhongshan University. He had organized a half dozen demonstrations and hunger strikes to promote democracy, freedom and the rule of law in coordination with the students’ protests in Beijing.
The flashpoint was Tiananmen Square, where hundreds of students and residents in Beijing were killed by the military.
‘I was outraged!’ Arthur wrote. ‘How could the People’s Liberation Army use its force against its own students and residents of Beijing? I organized another protest.’
He was summoned to report to the Office of Chinese Communist Party Youth League, Arthur wrote.
‘The secretary and his colleague interrogated me several times,’ he wrote. ‘I told them that the students are all patriotic and wanted the best for China.
‘I refused to provide them any more names of students who had participated in the organization of the demonstrations. … I was going to take full responsibility for everything that had happened since at one time I was elected the President of the Guangzhou Autonomous Student Union of Universities.
“Going to prison for me was a matter of time.’
Arthur said he was being followed by police and thought jail was inevitable. But one night, he wrote, a man he knew took him to a small harbor.
Bright lights, paradise on earth
It was 9 p.m. on a summer night in 1989, Arthur Liu wrote, when the boat arrived at a harbor in China.
The man who took Liu to the harbor thought he should leave the country, Liu wrote. Escaping to Hong Kong from China was criminally punishable up to three years in prison or a labor camp, according to Liu.
‘We got on the boat and he took off so quick that the four of us had to hold on to the boat so tight that a muscle on my chest area was painfully torn,’ he wrote. ‘The boat was skimming on top of the ocean leaving huge waves behind us.
‘I was told that this boat is faster than the boats the military and border (patrol) used to chase smugglers so that they won’t be caught. The smuggling business was booming between mainland China and Hong Kong in that era. Goods and people!’
To avoid the military, Arthur Liu wrote, the boat first headed into the ocean, public sea, and then turned toward Hong Kong. About two hours later, according to Liu, the boat pulled near the shore.
‘The colorful bright lights on thousands of giant tall buildings were eye blinding,’ he wrote. ‘So many of them! So grand in scale! I felt I had arrived in paradise on earth.
‘We got off the boat and stepped onto the land of freedom!’
Arthur eventually left Hong Kong and settled in northern California, where he earned a law degree from Hastings College, started his own law firm and his own family.
He is a single father of five children, the eldest being Alysa, who said over the years she’s continued to learned about her father’s personal history — in some cases from family members.
‘And then my best friend’s parents, they knew about it,’ she said. ‘So they would tell my best friend the stories and my best friend would report it back to me and be like, ‘Did you know this?’ And I’d be like, ‘What?”
In October, prompted by a reporter, Alysa Liu mused about what being spied on would look like as a movie.
‘They got to make me look like a super cool hero or something,’ she said. ‘I can’t just be the kid that got spied on and did nothing about it.
‘But honestly, I would just have the main focus be my dad’s story because his story is so cool.’
She cited her father’s persistence. “And he’s brave too,’ she added.
But now the story is focused on Alysa, who started skating at age 5.
‘She just took off on the ice,’ Arthur Liu said. “She was just chasing adults, hockey players, and making friends and with adults and girls of her own age, boys of her own age. She was just having so much fun on the ice.’
She’ll be competing at the Olympics with dark hair dyed with platinum stripes.
‘She’s a really creative young lady and full of ideas and imagination,’ Arthur Liu said. ‘I don’t know where that came from. I’m very pragmatic. I’m down to earth. I’m just step-by-step things and stuff like that.
‘But she’s very creative. She loves photography and some of her pictures, photos, I saw some of them, they are really creative. They were really beautiful and they really catch the moment.’
Now, on the world’s stage, the moment belongs to both of them.