Nathan Chen called a 'traitor' on Chinese social media after winning Olympic gold for US
Nathan Wei Chen, an American figure skater is under heat on social media for winning a gold and silver medal for team US. The 22-year-old Olympic champion is being referred to as a “traitor” on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Chen won his first Olympic gold in the men’s individual event and a silver medal in the team event for figure skating in the ongoing Winter Olympics held in Beijing.
The Chinese-American figure skater is receiving backlash on social media for choosing to represent the United States and was even told to “get out of China.” After his win on Thursday, Weibo users took it to the platform to complain that Chen was “too white” and Americanized. Further, the users on the platform came up with a long list of instances where they felt like Chen was “insulting China” with his actions.
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For now, Chen has not responded to the backlash he received and refused to speak on Chinese interviews, citing that his Mandarin “isn’t very good”. But said Chen did say that he is proud of being Chinese-American and that it hasn’t been very difficult to avoid criticism online since he doesn’t have access to the platforms in China, “I don’t have social media here. So I probably have been very sheltered from that. And I don’t plan on looking at social since sometimes social (media) can be a little toxic,” he said.
The Yale student also supported his fellow American Ice dancer Evan Bates when he spoke about China’s human rights abuses in an interview in October. Bates severely criticized China’s “awful” treatment of the Uyghur people, “We’re human beings, too, and when we read and hear about the things that are happening there, we absolutely hate that. We hate what’s going on there,” he said during a US Olympic and Paralympic Committee event. At the time Chen supported Evan saying “I agree with what Evan was saying, I think that for a greater change to occur, there must be power that is beyond the Olympics.” Chen added.
Among the list examples cited by Weibo users that hurt China was Chen’s first Olympics performance in 2018 to a song from the movie ‘Mao’s Last Dance’ which is a movie based on the premise of a Chinese dancer’s defection to the United States as a young cultural exchange student. However, Chen claimed to have no knowledge of the movie before performing the “beautiful” song. He also claimed that the song was chosen by his choreographer, “Maybe naively, I didn’t understand the whole system, the whole story behind it, just that the music was very beautiful,” he said.