Sentiment among nationalist fans is fickle, and pride turns to outrage when those not born in China, like Chinese American athlete Zhu Yi, are deemed to fail the nation.
The experiment to internationalize Chinese sports has not sat easily with fiercely nationalist fans who are watching the foreign-born athletes closely. When everything goes well, as it has with Gu, viewers accept them with pride. But one slip-up, in competition or elsewhere, and the attempt to straddle the line between nations can become perilous.
“Naturalized athletes are a shortcut — a contingency plan — for the host country to catch up and improve performance in a particular field,” said Sean Wang, a Beijing-based sports commentator.The search, Wang said, has focused primarily on athletes of Chinese descent because “for the average Chinese, it might be too much to swallow if we had a national team entirely of non-Chinese-looking faces, especially during Winter Games on home soil.
While naturalization is common across competitive sports in many other countries — and plenty of Americans have competed for the countries of their parents — the practice is relatively new in China. But winter sports presented a new set of challenges. The small communities of skaters and skiers were not enough of a pool for locally trained talent. In November 2018, China’s sports administration called on winter sports schools and associations to relax restrictions on nationality to encourage overseas Chinese and foreigners to take part in competitions.Retired Chinese figure skater Chen Lu launched an international hunt for talent that ended up bringing four U.S.
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