What Beijing's spies tried to do to this American girl – and to the father who dared escape their tyranny – is exactly the kind of thing they count on people staying quiet about.
America's newest Olympic gold medalist didn't just beat the world's best skaters in Milan last week.
She beat the Chinese Communist Party too – and it's a story the regime desperately hoped you'd never hear.
The Spy Operation Beijing Ran Against a Teenage Olympian
Alysa Liu's father, Arthur, grew up in a mountain village in Sichuan Province and spent his youth organizing hunger strikes and pro-democracy marches alongside students in Beijing.
Then came June 4, 1989.
The Communist Party sent tanks into Tiananmen Square and slaughtered hundreds of people whose only crime was demanding freedom.
Arthur fled China as a political refugee, settled in California's Bay Area, put himself through law school, and raised five kids as a single father.
But the CCP never forgot him.
In November 2021 – three months before 16-year-old Alysa was set to compete at the Beijing Winter Olympics – a man called Arthur and claimed to be a U.S. Olympic official.
He asked for faxed copies of their passports.
Arthur didn't like it and shut down the call.
Smart move – because that man was Matthew Ziburis, a former Florida corrections officer working as an agent for Chinese intelligence.
The FBI Got Involved and Beijing Got Exposed
The Department of Justice charged five men in March 2022 for running what they called a "transnational repression scheme" targeting Chinese dissidents living in the United States.
Ziburis was one of them.
He had physically traveled to the Bay Area to surveil the Liu family and extract private information for his CCP handlers.
Arthur described Beijing's goal plainly – they wanted to intimidate him into silence, to stop him from ever saying anything about human rights violations in China.
The FBI stepped in and assigned an agent to protect the family.
Young Alysa got to know that agent over dinner at a local Japanese restaurant, peppering her with questions the whole time.
"I'm also really interested in what she does," Alysa said recently. "Meeting with an FBI agent – that's crazy work."
The U.S. State Department and USOPC arranged for Alysa to have at least two escorts with her at all times during the Beijing Games.
Arthur Liu refused to let the CCP take the moment from his daughter.
"I'm not going to let them win," he said at the time. "To stop me. To silence me from expressing my opinions anywhere."
Why Beijing Targets People Like Arthur Liu
This wasn't an isolated incident.
In that same March 2022 sweep, DOJ charged a Chinese Ministry of State Security agent for trying to physically attack a congressional candidate – a fellow Tiananmen veteran running for a House seat in New York – to stop him from winning an election.
The agent was recorded telling a hired investigator that "violence would be fine too" if it ended the candidate's campaign.
In April 2023, the DOJ charged 40 Chinese national police officers for running illegal harassment operations on American soil – including a secret police station they operated out of a Bronx nonprofit until the FBI shut it down.
Beijing's message to every Tiananmen survivor living in America has always been the same: we know where you are, we know your children, and we will come for you.
She Skated Straight Through Their Intimidation and Won Gold
Alysa competed at the 2022 Beijing Games under escort, placed sixth, and came home and quit skating entirely.
She stuffed her skates in the back of a closet and left them there while she went to college, made friends, and lived a normal life for the first time since she was five years old.
When she came back to the ice in 2024, she did it on her own terms – picking her own music, shaping her own programs, skating with joy instead of obligation.
She won the 2025 World Championships and then went to Milan and ended a 24-year American gold medal drought in women's figure skating.
The last American woman to win Olympic gold in the discipline was Sarah Hughes in Salt Lake City in 2002.
That gold medal didn't just represent athletic excellence.
It represented something China tried – and failed – to prevent.
Compare that to Eileen Gu – the American-born skier who dumped Team USA to compete for China, made millions off CCP sponsorships, and suffered a brutal fall at these same Milan Games while competing under Beijing's flag.
One American girl's father fled Communist tyranny, got surveilled by their spies, and refused to be silenced.
The other American girl chose the Communists' team for the money and the fame.
One of them is standing on an Olympic podium with a gold medal around her neck.
The other is nursing her injuries.
Arthur Liu – the Tiananmen refugee who taught his daughter what freedom was actually worth – watched every second of it from the stands.
Sources:
- Jackson Thompson, "US Olympic Gold Medalist Alysa Liu Was Once Targeted by Chinese Spies," Fox News, February 18, 2026.
- Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, "Activist Father of U.S. Olympian Alysa Liu Targeted by Chinese Spy Ring," March 17, 2022.
- Department of Justice, "Five Individuals Charged Variously with Stalking, Harassing and Spying on U.S. Residents on Behalf of the PRC Secret Police," March 16, 2022.
- Department of Justice, "Five Individuals Indicted for Crimes Related to Transnational Repression Scheme," July 7, 2022.
- Breitbart News, "Alysa Liu, Victim of Chinese Spy Operation, Wins Gold for USA," February 19, 2026.
- PJ Media, "U.S. Gold Medalist's Father Escaped Tiananmen, and the CCP Spied on Her," February 19, 2026.
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