China's Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau quietly funneled $6.6 million last year to American-born Olympic skier Eileen Gu and fellow US-born figure skater Zhu Yi — a payment the public was never supposed to see. A budget document accidentally named both athletes as recipients. Officials erased the names. Social media complaints from Chinese citizens about the payments vanished shortly after.
The Wall Street Journal reported that both athletes were slated to receive a combined $14 million — roughly 100 million yuan — from the sports bureau over three years. It remains unclear how much of that sum went to each athlete individually.
What is clear: Beijing wanted this buried.
The budget document surfaced in early 2025 from the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, naming Gu and Yi as direct recipients of government funds, according to the NY Post. The names were subsequently removed from the record. Whatever public reaction emerged on Chinese social media — complaints, questions, anger — also disappeared, scrubbed from platforms in the way only a state with total information control can manage.
This is the Chinese Communist Party's standard operating procedure. The disclosure wasn't a scandal because of what it revealed about the athletes. It was a scandal because it revealed what Beijing pays to build its international sports brand — and how desperately officials moved to hide it once ordinary Chinese citizens could see the price tag.
Gu, now 22, has built one of the most lucrative personal brands in winter sports. She made her Olympic debut at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, winning gold in women's freeski big air and halfpipe and silver in slopestyle. At the 2026 Milan Cortina Games — her second Olympics — she secured her second career silver medal.
Her latest payment from Beijing was tied to qualifying for those 2026 Games.
The government money, though significant, represents only a fraction of Gu's total earnings. Forbes estimates she has pulled in $23 million from off-field endorsements alone, against roughly $100,000 in competition prize money. Her modeling portfolio includes Tiffany & Co. and Louis Vuitton. Her endorsement deals span Porsche, Red Bull, and IWC Schaffhausen. In January 2025, she earned approximately $40,000 for a World Cup slopestyle triumph. In December, another $40,000 for a World Cup halfpipe win and $55,000 for a top finish in the freeskiing halfpipe at Event Two: China in the Snow League.
A $23 million endorsement empire. Luxury brand campaigns. And still, millions in direct government payments from Beijing's sports budget. This is not an athlete who needed a state subsidy to compete.
The payments raise a straightforward question that Beijing clearly didn't want asked: what exactly is the Chinese government purchasing when it writes multimillion-dollar checks to American-born athletes?
Gu sparked controversy during the 2022 Winter Games over her decision to compete for her mother's native China rather than the United States. Zhu Yi went further — she renounced her US citizenship entirely. Both athletes perform under China's flag on the world stage.
Beijing isn't funding athletic development. These are finished products — world-class competitors shaped by American training infrastructure, American resources, and American opportunity. China is buying the output. It's purchasing legitimacy, soft power, and medal counts, then paying handsomely to keep the arrangement quiet.
The $14 million over three years isn't a sports investment. It's a propaganda line item.
If the payments were defensible, Beijing wouldn't have scrubbed them. That's the detail that matters most here — not the dollar figures, but the deletion.
Chinese citizens saw what their government was spending on imported Olympic talent and objected. The state's response wasn't to explain or justify the expense. It was to make the objections disappear. The names came off the budget. The social media posts evaporated.
This is a government that understood its own citizens would view the payments as illegitimate. In a country where economic pressure on ordinary families is real and well-documented, millions flowing to athletes who already earn luxury-brand money was never going to play well. Beijing knew it. And rather than face that tension honestly, officials reached for the only tool authoritarian systems trust — the eraser.
The comfortable American position is to treat this as a Chinese story — their budget, their censorship, their problem. But the athletes at the center of this arrangement were born in the United States. They were developed here. The talent pipeline runs in one direction, and the money flows back from a geopolitical rival.
There is no rule that says an American-born athlete must compete for America. But there's also no rule that says Americans have to be comfortable watching a foreign government — one actively working to displace US influence on the world stage — pay millions to recruit homegrown talent for its own flag.
Gu's choice to compete for China was, at the time, framed as a personal and cultural decision. The budget documents reframe it as a financial one — or at the very least, a decision with a very generous financial architecture supporting it.
Beijing erased the receipts. But the numbers made it out the door first.