At age 16 she was targeted by Chinese spies. She’s now the face of Olympic figure skating.
Just as Alysa Liu and her family boarded a plane, they got a call. It was the FBI.
A Chinese spy was on the way to their Bay Area home, the agency said.
“It was like a movie,” Alysa’s father, Arthur Liu, said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
That was in late 2021, more than four years before the figure skater dazzled the world with her joyful Olympic performance in Milan, bringing home gold that ended the United States’ 24-year medal drought in the women’s individual event.
Just 16 at the time, Alysa was on the path to her first Olympics in Beijing, unaware of a plot targeting her and her family behind the scenes.
A federal investigation later unveiled a weeks-long plot involving multiple conspirators, with one man, whom others called the “boss,” giving instructions from China.
They were after a trove of sensitive personal details about the Lius.
Red flags were already emerging before the FBI’s warning. Days earlier, a man had called Arthur claiming to be with the International Olympic Committee and asking for faxed copies of both his and Alysa’s passports in preparation for their upcoming trip to Beijing.
Arthur, suspicious of the unusual request, did not comply, and the conspirators tried other avenues to get what they wanted.
Court documents reveal they discussed placing a GPS tracker on Arthur’s car, installing hidden cameras to capture visitors, reporting on him daily, and tracking down the duo’s Social Security numbers through a contact at the IRS. With $800, they got the Lius’ passport photos and address in the name of “debt collection.”
Their neighbor later told Arthur that the man who posed as an Olympic official showed up near the Lius’ house and Arthur’s office multiple times. The neighbor recognized the man from a federal indictment.
What happened to the Lius illustrates how Beijing uses its long arm to suppress dissent.
“For all these years, the Chinese Communist Party has never stopped spying on me,” Arthur said. “They won’t let me off the hook.”
‘In the Shadows’
The intense interest from Beijing came as no surprise to Arthur, a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of young people who hoped for political reform in communist China were crushed by tanks or shot.
A key protest leader in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, Arthur fled mainland China after the bloodshed, escaping on a small boat to Hong Kong under the cover of night before seeking refuge in the United States.
Since rebuilding his life as an immigration lawyer, the father of five has remained a vocal critic of Beijing’s human rights record. And his eldest daughter, Alysa, now skating back into the international limelight, has been among his top supporters. At one point, she shared a social media post highlighting the abuse of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region, he said.
Arthur described having other brushes with Chinese agents over the years.
In the 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party sent a man to befriend him and collect his information.
Arthur had treated the man as a genuine friend, helping him settle down in the Bay Area. Years later, perhaps out of guilt, the man opened up about the secret mission.
Knowing Beijing’s penchant for deploying covert tactics, Arthur said he has learned to keep worries out of his mind and take things as they come.
“I live out in the open, but they are in the shadows, so if they want to do anything to me, there’s almost no way to guard against them,” he said.
More Peculiarities
Beijing’s COVID-19 pandemic restrictions largely shut out international spectators from the 2022 Winter Olympics, which meant that Arthur could not accompany Alysa, even though she was underage.
Alysa called often, and both the State Department and the International Olympic Committee worked to ensure her safety; two people escorted her during events.
However, early one morning, when the escorts were not with her and she and a friend were having ice cream in the Olympic Village, a stranger sat close to them. The man followed them around and invited them to his residence.
Alysa reported it to Olympic officials. Despite the dense array of cameras and sensors within the area, surveillance footage failed to capture the man, which struck Arthur as odd.
“We can only guess what happened,” he said. He speculated that the regime might have erased evidence in a cover-up.
Alysa once said she found the whole spying incident so “unbelievable” that she felt like a movie character.
But if her story ever becomes a movie, she said, its main focus should be her father, because everything else “only happened because of what he did.”
“We got to start with the roots,” she told reporters at the Team USA Media Summit in October 2025.
By Eva Fu
