Comments that have surfaced online suggest Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris‘ pick for vice president, Tim Walz, has for years sought to thread the needle between moral convictions and practicality when it comes to U.S.-China ties.
The Nebraska native, who has served as Minnesota’s governor since 2019, introduced himself as Harris’ running mate during a joint rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday. Newsweek reached out to Walz’s office with a written request for comment.
China looms large over this election cycle. Candidates’ past stances on the country are already a major political talking point, with Republican candidate Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign telling Newsweek last week that Harris’s record indicates she will “bow down to China at the expense of America.”
A Pew Research poll released in late April found that nearly half of Americans view China as a major foreign policy issue. A Gallup poll from the previous month found that over 40 percent of Americans consider China to be the United States’ primary adversary.
Walz’s connections to China are more personal than most American politicians, and they go back decades. After graduating from Nebraska’s Chadron State College with a B.S. in social science education in 1989, he taught at a Chinese high school for about a year through Harvard University’s WorldTeach program.
He arrived in China in 1989, the year that pro-democracy protests rocked the capital, Beijing.
“It felt like it felt like freedom was sweeping the world, and it was just such an optimistic feeling,” Walz said in footage of an interview making the rounds on X (formerly Twitter).
The Chinese government brutally cracked down on the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, with estimates of those killed ranging from hundreds to several thousand.
“I remember waking up and seeing the news on June 4 that the unthinkable had happened,” Walz said. He added that many of his fellow foreign teachers opted out of the program. “I felt it was more important than ever to go to make sure that story was told and to let Chinese, the Chinese people, know we were standing there. We were with them,” he said.
During his time as U.S. House representative for Minnesota’s 1st District, Walz was a critic of China‘s human rights record and co-sponsoring multiple related bills, including the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2017.
He also served on an independent government agency tasked with monitoring the human rights situation in China.
Walz has also voiced support for finding common ground with the East Asian power.
“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree,” he said in a 2016 interview that predated the U.S.-China trade war.
Walz added that he believes Washington should stand firm on issues like China’s activities in the South China Sea, where its expansive claims overlap with those of several neighbors and have led to confrontations with U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty ally, the Philippines.
“There’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on,” Walz added, citing a conversation he had with China’s agricultural minister in which the two discussed common concerns related to food production.
“It has opened, I think, channels of collaboration that I’ve been able to talk to the Chinese because when we’re on the same sheet of music, the world’s you know, two of the world’s great superpowers,” he said.
As governor, Walz has continued to favor cooperation with China on issues such as agriculture and climate change, but he has not shied away from criticism of the country.
“I’m disappointed with China’s recent performance—on the Ukraine issue, they are on Russia’s side,” he told Nikkei last year on China’s support for its northern neighbor following Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Walz said during the interview that, under his governorship, Minnesota restricted investment from China in favor of U.S. ally Japan.
“We welcome Japanese companies to invest billions of dollars in Minnesota, but we won’t accept Chinese companies,” he said in the same interview.
