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Republican Senator Ron Johnson attacked Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz over his ties to China, claiming it’s a red flag that the “radical leftist” got married “on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.”
Speaking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business, the Wisconsin lawmaker and member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee said of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate: “She’s a radical leftist. She chose another radical leftist. They’re just assuming the mainstream media is not going to cover his background.
“The House is going to investigate it now — it’s very strange. He got married on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. He’s gone to China. He’s taught in China. He’s got deep connections to China.”
Donald Trump’s conservative allies have tried hard to attack the Minnesota governor on a range of issues since he was chosen by Vice President Harris to join her on the Democratic ticket earlier this month, angered by Walz’s repeated attacks on Trump and his deputy JD Vance as “weird.”
The former high school teacher has been pilloried over his response to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in Minneapolis in response to the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 (despite then-President Trump praising his actions at the time), over his progressive policies on free meals and tampons in public schools and, outrageously, over his 24-years of service with the Army National Guard, accusing Walz of “stolen valor” by alleging, wrongly, that he chose to run for Congress in 2005 to avoid deployment to Iraq with his battalion.
None of that has stuck but Walz’s connection to China remains a persistent line of attack, a thin basis on which to accuse the Midwesterner of being an avowed communist.
Walz did spend a year in the Far East in 1989 when, aged 25, he taught English and American history and culture in Foshan, Guangdong province, as part of the WorldTeach program, learning Mandarin and proving popular with his pupils.
However, there is no evidence to suggest that he engaged in any political activity during his time there, which did coincide with the Tiananmen Square massacre, an event he found deeply shocking, the trip coming some 16 years before his first foray into politics.
The country clearly made a huge impression on the young Walz and he told The Star Herald newspaper in 1990 that his stay was “one of the best things” he had ever done and said of the Chinese people: “If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish.”
After returning to the United States, Walz met and fell in love with fellow educator Gwen Whipple. They did marry on the fifth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, June 4, 1994, and spent their honeymoon in China with 60 students in tow as part of a class trip.
Gwen told a newspaper at the time: “He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.”
The couple subsequently set up a business called Educational Travel Adventures to organize summer trips to China for American high school students and continued to run an exchange program there as part of that venture until 2003.
After entering 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 Xi Jinping’s authoritarian government in Beijing than curry favor.
In 2010, he co-sponsored a House motion condemning the arrest of activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo and fellow activist Huang Qi and, seven years later, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, calling for an end to human rights abuses in the former British colony in response to the independence protests led by Joshua Wong and others.
In other moves designed to infuriate President Xi, Walz 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 the country for allying itself with Russia in the wake of the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
