Jia You Ailing!

Gu Ailing is a very talented, decorated, and dedicated human being. As far as I can tell, she seems like a sweet person with killer instinct. This is a rare combination.

Chinese people seem to be just waking up to discover that she is a mercenary, i.e. that she “sells” her services to the highest bidder, in a sense playing up the hype to her own advantage. Even bad publicity is good publicity and when we are talking about endorsement deals and building a brand, Gu Ailing is showing herself perfectly capable of being a player rather than just a participant.

If you find yourself unliking Gu Ailing, the problem says more about you than her. I can riff off more clichés, like “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” In Gu Ailing’s case, the truism is exceedingly pertinent. Sports is never about friendly competition; or rather, under capitalism, any spirit of friendly competition inevitably mutates into a will to domination. Sports is about the surplus wealth that floats around the material reality of a pair of skis or a basketball.

If you train your whole life “for the love of the game” and manage to make it to the NBA, for example, you are nothing. You are just a bit player collecting a slave-wage at the behest of an organization that exploits your labor to generate massive sums of wealth that are distributed to the owners first; whether that wage is in the millions or tens of millions is irrelevant.

Chris Rock said it best: “I don’t want to be rich. I want to be wealthy. Shaq is rich. The person who signs Shaq’s checks is wealthy.”

Hating on Shaq for collecting as high a wage as possible is equivalent to hating on workers at any automobile plant who collectively bargain successfully.

Shaq understands perfectly that in addition to his use value as a player, he is much more valuable in terms of exchange value—i.e. in terms of building himself into a brand. That is where the real money is and because we live in a world where money is the sole mediating factor in judging what we take to be real, Shaq’s stature, image, personality (I mean his brand) only grows when he signs onto record deals, movie contracts, and advertising campaigns. He becomes more real.

Nowadays, he continues to collect a slave-wage by marketing himself to TNT, whoring out his own speech by providing color commentary and thus further inflating the use value of a mere sport (basketball) into a televisual commodity that is adequately packaged and narrativized. Shaq is certainly not a big player but a player nonetheless. As mercenary, he has the right to collect as much pie as possible in his lifetime, multiplying for as long as the market allows the use value of whatever actual material skills he once possessed on the court as a young man.

Capitalism isn’t simply about getting paid for what you exchange (i.e. your labor) in kind; real capitalists make money by mobilizing others to generate wealth for them. Once Shaq was a player generating profits for the NBA’s superstructure (i.e. the broadcasters like TNT); now he collects the very surplus wealth he once helped generate by sitting behind a desk on television himself. He earns his wage now by extracting from the labor value of the journeymen players who lace up every day on the court.

Yet at this stage, neither Shaq nor Eileen Gu “own,” say, a professional sports team, marketing company, label, or production house. The access they have to surplus is relatively small. In order to own requires years of accumulation. What Eileen Gu understands is the exchange value of herself as a brand; being Chinese or American has nothing to do with it as long as she is being discussed, is in the public eye. This is what counts as success under the auspices of modern market capitalism and is a tendency that has no nationality. Whether you are Chinese or American, if you have cash in your pocket no one can doubt your success.

In this way, the loyalty debate only increases the potential exchange value Gu can command in the market; if that debate metamorphoses into a debate about “gender” (i.e. women who act just as men do, by securing as much wealth for themselves above all else, are unfairly excoriated), all the better. Gu seems to understand this. While she does make the odd comment here and there, she knows that the true mercenary lets her enemies do the work. By keeping quiet and allowing the controversy to swirl, she wins in any case.

Perhaps the personal attacks take their toll; but for a seasoned mercenary who is focused on one thing only (accumulation), there is no good reason to be bothered by any of it. Eileen Gu is playing the game very well; she understands that gold medals are only the first step. She has already succeeded in garnering for herself the requisite (and paltry) use value of her labor; she has taken her reward money in kind. But the real sign of success, and the real index of ambition rewarded, is the exchange value generated by her brand which exceeds any amount she could hope to earn directly in any match or exhibition.

Over 16 seasons, Michael Jordan made a total of 93+ million dollars (in salary) as a player with both the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards, which is not even 3 percent of his net worth today. Michael Jordan is worth 3.2 billion dollars. How did he make up the windfall? Where is the extra $3.107 billion generated?

It is generated above and beyond anything material that happens on the court; in the world of capitalism, what counts as real is never the material reality but the ephemeral profits generated by power players who have never in their life set foot on a basketball court nor even touched a basketball. Immortal Technique puts it like so:

You think rappers are rich because of the songs you heard?
My labels make the money, and I haven’t rapped a fuckin’ word.

Michael Jordan is the only player in NBA history to become a player, meaning a real actor in the global arena with power. (Lebron also understands the real game and is making a play for MJ type power and influence; so did Kobe, who may have died because of it.) Jordan doesn’t seem all that interested in doing much with said power. After 9-11, a Liberal reporter stuck a microphone in his face and asked him, “In light of such a terrible tragedy, what is an NBA player’s job?” Jordan responded flatly: “What do you mean? Our job is to play.”

For the elites of the world, accumulation is enough and an end in itself. We all reward such behavior by looking on with awe and respect. A magical power accrues to those who personally possess a greater share of the world’s surplus than others because we know that via this wealth, they have the power to control others, which is secretly what we all want and is the only endgame of accumulation—social control and the ability to dominate others if only not to be dominated oneself.

By the way, does anyone know the 1982 British pop song, “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners? Some audio-visual wiz out there should record a Chinese version called “Jia You Ailing.” It could be either positive or negative; complete with Chinese lyrics, perhaps it would go viral.

If it were me, I would only make it positive; no point hating on Gu Ailing simply for winning a game she had no hand in creating but understands all too well. It’s the same sort of Liberal outrage that Democrats level at Donald Trump for not paying income tax. Trump doesn’t evade his taxes (which is a crime); he simply uses all legal means at his disposal to pay the least amount according to rules set not by himself. Why hate someone simply for playing the game correctly?

It will be interesting to see who Gu Ailing represents at the next Olympic games in Milan, Italy in 2026. No doubt the CIA is already concocting some sort of incentive scheme to lure her back onto Team USA. If things erupt between China and USA in the interim (over Taiwan, say) and China finds itself smeared the way Russia has been for the past four Olympic games (summer and winter), bringing Gu Ailing back to Team USA would be a colossal soft-power victory.

I continue to admire Gu Ailing; she’s proving herself to be a player in the largest sense; for those who find themselves betrayed because suddenly discovering that possibly Gu Ailing’s heart isn’t filled with love and reverence for her motherland (whether China or the USA), I can only respond, where are you living? Money, power, and respect in this world is never based on quaint immaterialities like love of country. This is the world of neoliberal reform that has been built into the world since at least the 1980s. Gu Ailing was born into this world; no reason to hate on her for playing the game to perfection and no reason further to expect her to change it. This is not her job; her job is to play.