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Tim Walz has been attacked from all angles by Republicans since being unveiled as Kamala Harris’s running mate to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance in November.
The mild-mannered Minnesota governor, 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard, and former high school teacher, has been called everything from a “radical leftist” to “Tampon Tim” as the opposition scrambles to define him in the eyes of voters.
So far, little has stuck, prompting Trump’s allies to turn to Walz’s ties to China as an avenue of attack.
“This is a ticket that wants this country to go communist immediately if not sooner,” Trump told Fox and Friends in a phone interview in August.
On the campaign trail, Vance also accused Walz of wanting to “ship more manufacturing jobs to China”.
On social media, Richard Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany, posted in response to Walz joining the Democratic ticket: “Communist China is very happy with Tim Walz as Kamala’s VP pick. No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz.”
In China, local internet users have speculated that Walz was an undercover CIA agent responsible for stirring up the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, according to The Times. The outlandish claim appears to be premised solely on the fact that Walz happened to be in China at the time.
So what is the truth behind Walz’s links with China?
It’s true that Walz, aged 25 and a novice teacher, taught English and American history and culture in Foshan in southeastern Guangdong province between 1989 and 1990 as part of the WorldTeach program.
There is no evidence that he engaged in any political activity during his time there.
Yet, the trip clearly made an impression on him. The young educator told The Star Herald newspaper in 1990 that his stay was “one of the best things” he had ever done. “If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish,” Walz said of the Chinese people.
In a later interview with The Hill in 2007, he recalled: “China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went.”
Years after that first trip, Walz and wife Gwen set up a business called Educational Travel Adventures to organize summer trips to China for American high school students. They even chose the country for their honeymoon in 1994. The couple continued to run an exchange program there until 2003.
After being elected to Congress in 2007, Walz served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, focusing on human rights issues and frequently taking positions much more likely to anger the authoritarian government in Beijing than curry favor.
In 2010, Walz co-sponsored a House motion condemning the arrest of activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo and fellow activist Huang Qi.
Walz also met with the Dalai Lama in 2016 and called for greater religious freedoms for Tibet; attacked Chinese aggression in the South China Sea; and criticized China for allying itself with Russia after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
However, unlike former president Donald Trump, who started a punishing trade war with China during his presidency by raising import tariffs on Chinese goods, Walz has advocated for less “adversarial” relations with Beijing and greater cooperation.
“I think Walz is going to put a lot of people who care a lot about American foreign policy in this part of the world at ease, knowing that there is someone on the ticket who is informed, has spent time in the region, and is not starting from square one when it comes to learning about American foreign policy in East Asia,” Lev Nachman, political scientist at National Taiwan University, told Voice of America.
The Chinese government has not commented specifically on Walz’s ascent to the Democratic ticket other than to say that it hopes for better relations with Washington after the election – whichever side wins.
