Today, Feb. 19, Alysa Liu, American figure skater, stood on an Olympic podium and received a gold medal. Her achievement is truly the American dream, and even more so as her father came to America seeking refuge from murderous Communist tyranny.
Arthur Liu grew up in a little mountain village of China's Sichuan province, according to People magazine, in a family of six children. When he was 25 years old, he actively participated in the pro-democracy protests that culminated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. After that, Arthur managed to flee the country and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tyranny for a new life in America. But decades later, the Liu family became targets of Chinese spying, with one foreign agent persistently persecuting them.
Both Arthur and his daughter Alysa lived the American dream in completely different ways. Arthur earned his law degree at the University of California, founded a law practice, and raised a family as a single parent. Alysa became an international skating sensation by age 16, but after that she took time off from the sport before returning to it and competing in her second Olympics, the ongoing games in Milan, where she won a team gold medal and an individual gold in the free skating event.
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This Olympics in Milan was certainly a change from her last experience at the international games. There are dozens of secretive Chinese police stations around the world, including multiple in the U.S., along with thousands of spies and confidential sources. The CCP has a vast international network to intimidate dissidents, sway foreigners, and maintain a role of dominance on the world stage. And when Alysa Liu was only 16 years old, as she was set to compete in the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, she had to meet with an FBI agent to discuss CCP efforts to surveil and intimidate her family.
She remembered it as "a little bit freaky and exciting." On the one hand, Fox News related, she felt as if she were in a movie, and on the other hand, knowing her father's pro-freedom activism back in China, she understood why the CCP would go after him. As recently as October 2025, authorities charged Matthew Ziburis, who contacted Arthur Liu in 2021, with impersonating a United States official and trying to obtain the family's passport numbers. Ziburis later traveled to California to spy on the Liu family more directly and try to worm private information out of them. He aimed to pass all such information onto his CCP spymasters.
Arthur described this as "a way [to] threaten us not to say anything," not to talk about "human rights violations in China." At the time, he was afraid for Alysa's safety as she went to Beijing. While at those games, she had two escorts at all times, but both she and her father credit the U.S. government with keeping her safe.
After winning the free skate gold medal, Alysa said she had an "unbelievable feeling when I was done skating. And when I was skating — hearing the cheers — and I felt so connected with the audience. I want to be out there again." The child prodigy earned the best possible award for an athlete.
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