Tim Walz wanted a wedding date he would “always remember.” So he chose June 4th, 1994 — the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. In 1989, Walz actually learned about the events in Tiananmen Square while he was traveling between Hong Kong and mainland China to teach for a year. For his honeymoon, he and his wife, Gwen Whipple, returned to China with 60 students in tow — one of many summer trips he would organize on the side as a public school teacher.

For Walz, who was selected on Tuesday as vice president Kamala Harris’s running mate, it was an early example of his decision to engage with China without shying away from the ugliest episodes of its recent history. The Nebraska native turned Minnesota congressman went on to serve on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a niche commission established in 2000 with the narrow mandate to monitor and report on human rights and the rule of law in China. And Walz still shows off some of his Mandarin and Cantonese language skills when given the chance.

At a time when China has become a central issue to U.S. foreign policy, many observers see this kind of hands-on experience as a breath of fresh air.

“It’s impressive that he has genuine and extensive experience in China and is not just shadow boxing with a western caricature,” says Daniel Russel, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Obama administration.

But some conservatives see Walz’s willingness to engage with China as a liability. “Tim Walz doesn’t see China as a problem,” James Hutton, former assistant secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs during the Trump administration, posted on X. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, meanwhile, posted: “Tim Walz owes the American people an explanation about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China.”

To make sense of Walz’s China chops and how he might influence a potential Harris administration, The Wire reviewed Walz’s past interviews, speeches and voting record, and spoke to those familiar with his China experience. 

TIANANMEN

After graduating from Chadron State College in Nebraska, Walz joined the first cohort of teachers to go to China with the WorldTeach program, a non-profit affiliated with Harvard University.

Walz was assigned to Foshan No. 1 High School in Guangdong province, a historic school on the outskirts of Guangzhou and just a few hours away from Hong Kong and Macau, where he earned $80 a month, roughly double the salary of local teachers. While there, he learned Cantonese and Mandarin, and was given the nickname 添 (tim1 in Cantonese), according to reporting by The Initium, which interviewed a former colleague and student of Walz’s at the school.

In a 1990 interview with the Scottsbluff Star Herald, Walz recalled taking at least six trips to Macau, then a Portuguese colony, where he could eat McDonald’s and watch English language movies.

The crackdown in Tiananmen began on the cusp of his departure from Hong Kong for the mainland. 

“I still remember the train station in Hong Kong. There was a large number of people…very angry that we would still go after what had happened,” he told a Congressional hearing years later, on the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen in 2014. “But it was my belief at that time that 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.” 

Experiencing China in the aftermath of the crackdown had a profound impact on Walz’s subsequent career. “It was interesting to watch many of those Chinese who so recently had come through the Cultural Revolution express concerns about what would happen if you upset the fruit basket,” he reflected, at that same hearing. “The lesson to me… was 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.”

The issue of complicity and how ordinary people could turn a blind eye to repression became a theme that Walz would return to repeatedly as a student — he obtained a masters degree in genocide studies — and as an educator, teaching Holocaust education in Nebraska. 

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Walz said in a 2008 interview with The New York Times. “The problem is… that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path.”

CHINA TOURS

By 1994, the year that Walz and Whipple married, Walz had already begun taking groups of students to China. An exchange a year earlier was arranged by a friend of Walz’s in China’s ministry of foreign affairs, according to an account by the Star-Herald. 

In 1995, the couple started a business — Educational Travel Adventures Inc. — with the purpose of taking students from Mankato West High to China every two years. 

For Emily Falenczykowski-Scott, the China trip was life changing. A rising senior at Mankato West High School in the summer of 2001, she recalls turning to Walz on a riverboat in Guilin and asking, “How do I do this for the rest of my life?” 

Following Walz’s advice, she attended the University of Wisconsin and studied Chinese before moving to China for a job connecting foreign clients with suppliers in the garment industry. (She is now an accountant in Minnesota.)

She adds: “I’ve seen some things posted like ‘The CCP loves Mr Walz.’ But honestly someone whose eyes are wide open about the dangers associated with an authoritarian government, who knows the actual dangers of poking China and where the misunderstandings are… He’s more likely to be someone who is China’s least favorite, because he understands it so well.”

Educational Travel Adventures was dissolved in 2008, two years after Walz was elected to Congress. 

ELECTION TO CONGRESS

Walz was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006, representing Minnesota’s 1st District. He was relatively unknown, but he immediately positioned himself as a China specialist and began criticizing the the Bush administration’s relations with China just a month after his election. He called the undervaluation of China’s currency “the worst-kept secret in the world” and accused then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson of soft-pedaling the issue. 

In 2007, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Walz to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC).

“It is extremely important that America continues to pay close attention to human rights in China and that we are careful about further expansion of our trade relationship with China,” Walz said at the time. “There is great potential in China for our [agriculture] producers and for other industries, but we must ensure that we act in a measured and conscientious way in order to realize that full potential without losing additional American jobs.”

“[H]e was… genuinely interested in everyone’s ‘China story,’” says Andrea Worden, who served as general counsel for the CECC at the time. “He was deeply curious about what had drawn the staffers to China, if we had spent time there, if we spoke Chinese, and what we thought about the future trajectory of China’s political system, and U.S.-China relations.” 

Activists who worked with the Commission describe Walz as a well-informed and reliable representative who took personal interest in issues, including democracy in Hong Kong and Tibetan rights. 

“Of the 535 members of Congress, I would say fewer than 10 would be able to deliver a speech on Hong Kong without notes on the spot,” says Jeffrey Ngo, a Hong Kong activist.

According to Ngo, in 2016, Walz was the only commissioner willing to meet with Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong activist who is now in prison, on short notice. Ngo also credits Walz with helping to keep momentum behind the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which requires the U.S. government impose sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials responsible for human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

“The only reason [the bill] would later pass in 2019 — when introduced for the fourth time — was because it didn’t die. And the reason it didn’t die was because there were a handful of people who were willing to keep it alive. I think that’s Tim Walz’s legacy on Hong Kong,” says Ngo. 

In 2015, Walz joined speaker Pelosi on a rare visit to Tibet. He described having candid talks with Chinese officials, who did not hesitate to point out the U.S.’s own human rights record. In particular, they focused on the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which U.S. soldiers killed 300 indigenous people at Pine Ridge, South Dakota — where Walz had once taught.

“I would never have imagined being in the deepest enclaves of the Chinese government with some of their highest level officials having a debate about the Dalai Lama,” Walz said at a press conference after the visit. “[T]hey knew I had taught on Pine Ridge, and they asked me how the Native American situation has gone for America over their history, and rightfully pointed out that mistakes were made.” 

“So it was a healthy dialogue. It was one that absolutely has to happen… this relationship is too critically important; it’s too critically important on trade; it’s too critically important on climate change; it’s too critically important on national security…”

The following year, he also met with the Dalai Lama over a lunch that he described as “life-changing.” 

TRADE AND ECONOMIC COMPETITION

Walz was relatively early in calling for the U.S. to do more to combat unfair trade practices by China’s green technology sector. In 2010, he was one of 181 Representatives to call for the Obama administration to impose Section 301 punitive tariffs on Chinese renewable energy producers, including solar and wind companies. And in 2012, in an effort to compete against Chinese suppliers, Walz cosponsored a bipartisan energy bill that would extend production tax credits for wind energy manufacturers until 2020.

But Walz, whose congressional district relied heavily on pork production and exports to China, vocally opposed Trump’s trade war with China. “This is yet another example of a president who either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the consequences of his rash foreign policy actions,” Walz said in 2018. “We need someone in the Oval Office who is going to put the interests of America’s farmers and the working-class over their own self-interest. President Trump isn’t cutting it.”

Walz is hoping he can help Kamala Harris get this message across in 2024. And although the politics and geopolitics have changed considerably since his early trips to China, he’ll likely be drawing on his China expertise once again if he makes it back to Washington.

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