Tim Walz's Long Relationship With China Defies Easy Stereotypes
By: Amy Qin and Keith Bradsher (The New York Times)
Tim Walz is a Reagan Democrat. Bill Clinton embraced Reagan's small government ideology by eliminating 250,000 Federal jobs and partnering with big business. Under Clinton, big business operated the government, wrote the regulations that Congress would not, and advocated for unfettered domestic and foreign trade. And we, as voters, were supposed to be too stupid to understand that liberalized business and trade has never, ever worked in all of recorded human history. In all of recorded human history liberalized business and trade has only provided incentives for exploitation, slavery, despotism, war, and a host of other social ills.
Maybe Tim Walz really is that stupid. But that would certainly be out of character for a midwestern farmer. Anybody with a lick of common sense would recognize that Reagan and Clinton sold out the country. So, Tim Walz shouldn't pee down our backs and tell us it's the milk of human kindness.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In the summer of 1989, Tim Walz faced a difficult choice.
A newly minted college graduate from small-town Nebraska, he had just turned down a stable, 9-to-5 job offer and moved across the world to teach at a local high school in China. He had made it as far as Hong Kong, just across the Chinese border, when People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush pro-democracy protests.
Rumors were flying about a possible civil war in China. Many foreigners, including most American teachers, had fled the country. Should he go back home or continue his journey into China?
He decided to go in.
“It was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people,” Mr. Walz recalled in 2014 during a congressional hearing marking the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. “The opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important.”
The one year that Mr. Walz spent teaching English in southern China was the start of what would become a decades-long relationship with the country. As high school teachers in Nebraska and Minnesota, Mr. Walz and his wife, Gwen, regularly led trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s to introduce students to China’s history and culture. Mr. Walz has said that he has traveled to China some 30 times, including for his honeymoon.
That deep history of engagement with China reflects a lesser-known international dimension of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. If elected vice president, Mr. Walz would bring to the White House unusually extensive personal experience in China — a history that supporters say could be an asset at a time of volatile relations between Washington and Beijing.
But the campaign has so far made little mention of Mr. Walz’s experience there, even as it has leaned into depictions of the Minnesota governor as an avuncular Midwestern dad, coach and teacher. And it has yet to lay out how Vice President Kamala Harris or Mr. Walz would handle China, which both the Biden and Trump administrations have treated with toughness.
Republicans, by contrast, have already begun to seize on the governor’s personal experience in China to accuse him of being soft on a country that is now seen as America’s greatest military and economic rival.
Richard Grenell, who served as ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence in the Trump administration, said on X that “Communist China” was “very happy” with Ms. Harris’s choice of Mr. Walz as her running mate. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said that Mr. Walz owed “the American people an explanation about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China.”
A spokesman for Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz’s campaign accused Republicans of “twisting basic facts” and “desperately lying” to distract from former President Donald J. Trump’s agenda.
“Throughout his career, Governor Walz has stood up to the CCP, fought for human rights and democracy, and always put American jobs and manufacturing first,” said James Singer, the spokesman, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will ensure we win the competition with China, and will always stand up for our values and interests in the face of China’s threats.”
Mr. Walz’s record in the House, from 2007 to 2019, showed a lawmaker who often drew on his personal experience in the country to lay out sharp critiques of China’s human rights record. He took a special interest in Tibet and Hong Kong, meeting with both the Dalai Lama and Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist.
An adventure
Years before Mr. Walz became an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, he was a wide-eyed college graduate eager to learn more about the world beyond the farms and ranches of Nebraska.
Mr. Walz was 25 when he arrived at Foshan No. 1 High School in southern China, near Hong Kong, as part of the WorldTeach program, a nonprofit affiliated with Harvard University. The school is in one of Foshan’s oldest neighborhoods, where thick banyan trees dangle aerial roots over sidewalks and streets.
Mr. Walz soon settled into the cocoon of daily life on a small-town campus, even as the chaos of the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than 1,100 miles away rippled across the country. He taught four English and U.S. history classes a day with about 65 students in each class. As one of the first American teachers at the school, he was afforded small luxuries like an air-conditioner and a monthly salary of around $80 — double what the local teachers earned.
Students loved their “big-nosed” teacher, giving him the nickname “Fields of China” because his kindness, they explained to him, was so expansive. For Christmas, some of his students and friends cut down a pine tree, decorated it and brought it to his room.
“No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again,” Mr. Walz told the Star-Herald in Scottsbluff, Neb., in 1990.
He also took a train up to Beijing and visited Tiananmen Square, where soldiers had fatally shot hundreds, maybe thousands, of protesters and bystanders not long before.
Upon his return to Nebraska in 1990, he told the Star-Herald that going to China was “one of the best things” he had ever done. But he said he also felt that the Chinese people had been mistreated and cheated by their government for years.
“If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish,” Mr. Walz said at the time. “They are such kind, generous, capable people.”
Returning again and again
By 1994, Mr. Walz had taken a job teaching social studies at Alliance High School in western Nebraska. There, he met and fell in love with a fellow teacher, Gwen Whipple. They married on June 4 — which happened to be the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. He later would say, “There was no doubt I would remember that date.”
Shortly after, they left for a trip that effectively became their honeymoon: a field trip to China with 60 students.
Mr. Walz was determined to share with his students the marvel of discovering the wider world beyond small-town America, according to interviews with four former students and a professor who went on the yearly trips that the Walzes had organized in the 1990s.
The students, most of whom had never traveled abroad, barely spent any time in the classroom. In addition to sightseeing, they met with tai chi masters, practiced their chopstick skills at family-style meals and tried Chinese calligraphy.
On the trip in 1993, Mr. Walz brought the group to meet his former students at Foshan No. 1 High School. One of Mr. Walz’s friends guided them throughout the two-week trip and was so beloved that one of the students, Kyle Lierk, recalled crying when they had to say goodbye.
“It was clear that Tim was able to build the trip around humanity,” recalled Mr. Lierk, now 47.
Shay Armstrong, a former student who went in 1993 and 1994, recalled learning about some of the more disturbing aspects of Chinese Communist Party rule. They were told about the harsh “one-child” policy, under which most couples who had more than one child were forced to pay fines.
While visiting Tiananmen Square, Mr. Walz explained the history of the bloody crackdown and the brutal governance of Mao Zedong, China’s former chairman, she said.
“It wasn’t all bubbles, hearts and rainbows,” recalled Ms. Armstrong, now 46.
The Walzes continued leading the student trips to China even after they moved in 1996 to Mankato, Minn., organizing the visits through a company that they had established called Educational Travel Adventures.
A vocal critic of China
As a congressman, Mr. Walz did not shy away from talking about his experience in China.
But he was also critical of the Chinese government from the start. And over his 12-year tenure in the House, Mr. Walz’s criticisms of China’s human rights record became even sharper, especially as the Chinese government took a more authoritarian turn under Xi Jinping.
Mr. Walz served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan group of lawmakers focused on monitoring and reporting on human rights and the rule of law in China. Transcripts show that other commission members often praised Mr. Walz for his expertise.
“You are a great asset to our commission,” Representative Chris Smith, Republican from New Jersey and then-chairman of the commission, said to Mr. Walz during a 2011 hearing.
Mr. Walz cosponsored a resolution demanding the release of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident and Nobel laureate. He criticized China’s unfair trade practices and crackdown on rights lawyers and religious groups.
In 2015, Mr. Walz participated in a rare American delegation to Tibet led by Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader. The next year, he met with the Dalai Lama in what he later described in a social media post as a “life-changing” lunch.
Jeffrey Ngo, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, credited Mr. Walz with being at one point the only House Democrat willing to continue backing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which would compel the U.S. government to impose sanctions on officials responsible for human rights abuses in Hong Kong.
Mr. Ngo said Mr. Walz’s support helped keep the bill alive at a crucial time until it was eventually passed.
“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,” Mr. Ngo said.
Toward the end of his tenure in Congress, Mr. Walz continued to stress the importance of identifying areas of cooperation with China. But he also began to question the long-held wisdom that opening up trade with China would lead the country to become more open and democratic.
“I certainly was under the illusion that liberalizing trade and openness would have a significant impact on liberalization of personal freedoms,” Mr. Walz said during a congressional hearing in 2016. “I have now seen that is not the case.”
In the decades since Mr. Walz arrived at Foshan, the high school that launched his lifelong interest in China has expanded considerably.
On a visit to the high school on Wednesday, news of Mr. Walz’s ascent to the Democratic ticket drew vastly different reactions.
As students in blue and white uniforms exited the school’s gates, they said that their school’s connection to a suddenly prominent American politician had been the talk of classrooms and online chat rooms.
Meanwhile, a school dean said that the school had no comment on Mr. Walz. And guards at the school gate prevented journalists from entering the grounds to see the campus museum.
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If you want a return to the status quo of Reagan Republicanism then Tim Walz is your guy. If you want to believe the Clinton fairy tales of benevolent CEOs running charitable trade operations then Tim Walz is your guy. If you actually think the business friendly Federal government opens the southern border and welcomes illegal immigrants because of humanitarian concerns then Tim Walz is your guy.
If you want to sell out the United States then Tim Walz is your guy. Vote early, vote often.
Until now I was nobody's guy, and if I could I would have declared a pox on BOTH your political houses, but having read the article you now posted, in particular my being a person who taught English, Business English and Australian law in a private high school in China for 6 years, and knowing that he has at least as deep an understanding of China and the Chinese people as I have (although I've been living in China now for 18 years and am married to a Chinese woman and accepted into her extended family), if I were able to do so I would go so far as to campaign for him, to walk the streets of America and knock on doors for him (oh, wait a second, in America that's bound to get me shot). I am no longer neutral concerning the election for PotUS. Thank you for posting the article.
Afraid you'll be disappointed. Walz is a politician and a Democrat, to boot. The present focus is on the southern border. China is only useful for chest thumping and war drums. It's a simple trade-off, a Harris administration would need to be tough on China to hide being soft on illegal immigrants.
China is only useful for chest thumping and war drums
China takes aggressive actions like this pretty much everyday, and the progressive response is to get mad at anyone who notices it.
Well, anyway, although I am in agreement with a lot of Walz's comments about China, I still can not stomach Harris's stance on the Israel/Hamas conflict, so I take back my comment about campaigning for Walz, and return to never wanting to vote for EITHER of your parties.
Maybe it's because I read this article in the Jerusalem Post: LINK -> A Harris presidency would be an existential threat for Israel - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)
A reason I feel the way I do about Walz is that I have in fact agreed with some of the things he said about China. His comment about the CPC (the CORRECT designation, not CCP) detaining civil rights lawyers was exactly what I actually had the nerve to post about on NT when they detained the lawyers who were acting for the parents whose children were killed when the schools collapsed during the massive earthquake in 2008. There was a collaboration between the government inspectors and the contractors when the contractors cheated on the quality or the reinforced concrete used in the schools' construction and the parents sued because of it, and their lawyers were detained. I posted an article on NT about that because I was so upset about it, and chanced being detained myself if the government knew about me. China is NOT without its warts and I will be the first to admit it.