In November 2016, the Democrats were in disarray. Donald Trump had just been declared the winner of the US presidential election, and congresspeople and staffers alike were panicking about the future of American democracy – and their own jobs. It was a tricky time to organise an event about Hong Kong, a Chinese city that few people in the Capitol had given much thought to since the Umbrella Movement of 2014.
For a while, it seemed that no one from Congress would turn up to meet Joshua Wong, the bespectacled – and now imprisoned – student leader who was flying to Washington for a briefing organised by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), a government agency.
Shortly before the event, however, a congressperson from Minnesota agreed to come. “He took the podium and he just talked … at least for six or seven minutes, just non-stop,” remembered Jeffrey Ngo, a US-based Hong Kong activist who helped to organised the session. Unlike other congresspeople who normally rely on written notes, he “spoke from his heart” about the importance of human rights and democracy in Hong Kong, Ngo said. “I just remember thinking that he really knew his stuff.”
Tim Walz, who on 6 August was announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate for the US election in November, has a long history with China. Republicans have pounced on this to accuse the now-governor of Minnesota of being pro-Beijing. In a post on X, Tom Cotton, an Arkansas senator, said that the American people were owed an explanation about Walz’s “unusual” relationship with China.
But Walz’s admirers, including critics of the Chinese government, have welcomed the sudden prominence of an American politician who is seen as having a nuanced and people-centric approach to the US’s major geopolitical rival.
Walz first went to China in 1989 as a college graduate, to teach English at Foshan No 1 High School in south China’s Guangdong province. The posting was nearly called off shortly before he was due to enter China, as early on 4 June 1989, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on peaceful protesters around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians.
But Walz and his fellow teachers decided to follow through with their plan to teach in China. He later recalled that “a large number of people” were “very angry” about that decision. “But it was my belief at the 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,” Walz said in 2014.
While at Foshan, Walz was treated “like royalty” according to a former colleague, a teacher surnamed Pang, who was interviewed by Chinese-language outlet Initium Media. “We all had a good impression of him … his smile is very contagious,” said Pang, who recalled Walz spending his monthly salary in the humid city on ice-creams. Another former Foshan teacher, Chen Weichuan, described Walz as “easygoing” and someone who “smiled all day”.
After returning to the US, Walz set up a company with his wife to facilitate summer trips to China for American students. Jillian Walker, a Minnesota lawyer who went on one of the trips in 1997, said last week that Walz helped to “mould me into a new way of thinking”.
“I can read about China in a book, but if I go there, think how impactful that could be,” Walker said.
Former US students have recalled how Walz would take them to Tiananmen Square to explain the history of the bloody crackdown. In a 2014 testimony, he said that the lesson he drew from the massacre was that, “when you watch these things happen you can justify and make up in your mind any reason possible that you didn’t stand up or that something didn’t happen or that no one remembered”.
Walz wanted to remember that moment so much so that he even got married on the massacre’s fifth anniversary, because “he wanted to have a date he’ll always remember”, according to his wife.
Walz’s ongoing support for human rights in China, including places considered especially sensitive by the Chinese Communist party (CCP) are at odds with Republican attempts to portray him as being pro-Beijing.
In 2009, long before human rights abuses in Xinjiang were a mainstream issue in Washington, Walz spoke of a “culturacide” – cultural genocide – taking place there and in Tibet.
In 2016, he met the Dalai Lama, an experience he described as “life-changing”. That same year he brought students from Minnesota to meet with the leader of the Tibetan government in exile. Beijing regularly condemns any foreign leaders who meet with the Tibetan spiritual leader.
Walz is someone “who seems to genuinely care about Tibet and [has] sought to understand it”, said John Jones of Free Tibet, a London-based NGO. “It is not rare to find politicians in the US and the UK who are broadly critical of the Chinese government … but that is not the same as being pro-Tibet. Tibetans’ greatest supporters are those who seek to understand how Tibetans have built democratic institutions in exile and are informed enough to raise specific abuses against Tibetans. This is what marks someone out as a friend of Tibet.”
In the 35 years since Walz first set foot in China, relations between Washington and Beijing have been tumultuous. As he vies to take the second-highest office in the US, they are at a low point.
Analysts have pointed out that vice-presidents often, although not always, have a limited role in foreign policy. So it’s not yet clear what influence Walz’s personal knowledge of China could have on a potential Harris administration. In his brief time on the campaign trail, he is yet to make any major statements about China. But as the first person on a presidential ticket to have lived in China since George HW Bush, Walz has been largely welcomed by China experts.
