HONG KONG — Before being named Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz’s career included extensive experience with China — a relationship that drew immediate GOP criticism and became a hot topic of discussion on Chinese social media Wednesday.
The Minnesota governor’s ties with the country, which stretch back to his first days out of college, have been a constant in his career.
His history with Beijing — which increasing numbers of Americans view as an “enemy” — could be a point of contention in the presidential campaign at a time when being tough on the rival superpower is one of the few issues both parties can agree on.
Walz’s stance on China, a country he says he has been to about 30 times, appears to be broadly in line with that of the Biden-Harris administration, which is “managing competition” with the world’s second-largest economy while also looking for opportunities to cooperate on issues of global import such as climate change.
While Walz has been critical of the ruling Communist Party, as well as of China’s trade practices and growing aggression in the South China Sea, he says there are “many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”
“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” he said in a video interview in 2016.
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Walz, 60, first went to China after graduating from college in 1989, spending a year teaching English and American history and culture at a high school in the southern Chinese city of Foshan through Harvard’s WorldTeach program.
His arrival coincided with a deadly crackdown by Chinese authorities on pro-democracy protesters in and around Tiananmen Square in the capital, Beijing, that severely strained China’s international relations.
The bloody crackdown had a lasting impact on Walz, who saw it as all the more reason to go.
“It was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people, and the opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important,” he later said in congressional testimony.
Walz kept up his connection with China after returning to the United States, where he taught at schools in Nebraska and Minnesota. Through the company they set up, Educational Travel Adventures, Walz and his wife, Gwen, took groups of high school students to China every summer for years, even spending their honeymoon there.
They were married June 4, 1994, the five-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
“He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” Gwen Walz, a fellow teacher, told a local newspaper before their wedding.
Walz praised the people he met in China even as he criticized a government he saw as holding them back.
“If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish,” he told the Nebraska newspaper The Star-Herald in 1990. “They are such kind, generous, capable people. They just gave and gave and gave to me. Going there was one of the best things I have ever done.”
As a member of Congress, Walz has been outspoken on human rights issues in China, co-sponsoring the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2017 and resolutions on Tiananmen Square and pro-democracy activists such as the late Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo.
Walz traveled to Tibet in 1990 and again in 2015 as a member of a congressional delegation, and in 2016 had what he said was a “life-changing lunch” with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. While China has facilitated modernization in Tibet, Walz told Congress, it was important to press the Chinese government “to ensure the preservation of traditional Tibetan culture.”
He also served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which is focused on human rights.
“Walz is perhaps the most solid candidate when it comes to human rights and China on a major-party ticket in recent memory — if not ever,” Jeffrey Ngo, a senior policy and research fellow at the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council who met with Walz in 2016, said in a post on X.
Nonetheless, Walz’s China experience drew immediate suspicion from Republicans who accused him of being “pro-China.”
“Tim Walz owes the American people an explanation about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a post on X.
Walz’s ties with China also drew attention from social media users in the country, where commenters expressed hope as well as misgivings.
“It’s rare to have an American politician openly say that the two countries can coexist without opposition,” read one comment on Weibo.
Others said it was not necessarily a good thing for American politicians to be more familiar with China.
“The more American politicians understand Chinese, the more they may suppress China, as they might see the Chinese government’s actions as a threat to democracy,” one commenter said.
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