Benedict Smith
02 October 2024 2:51am
Tim Walz has been accused of lying about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
The Minnesota governor and vice-presidential candidate has repeatedly claimed that he was teaching in the territory when the Chinese government crushed pro-democracy demonstrations, killing hundreds in the process.
However, Minnesota Public Radio News has placed Mr Walz in Nebraska at the time of the massacre, citing local news reports from the time.
The development came up during his debate against JD Vance on Tuesday evening where, confronted over his earlier statements, Mr Walz said he “misspoke”.
Mr Walz, who spent 24 years in the National Guard, has previously admitted he “misspoke” when he claimed to have carried weapons “in war”. In fact, he never saw active service in a combat zone and left the military before his battalion was deployed to Iraq.
As a congressman for Minnesota, he told fellow lawmakers in 2014: “As a young man, I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May of ’89.
“And as the events were unfolding, several of us went in. And I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.
“The opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important. And it was a very interesting summer to say the least.”
The Tiananmen Square protests took place between April and early June 1989. A Nebraska newspaper report from May 16 1989 reportedly shows a photo of Walz touring a Nebraska National Guard storeroom.
According to the caption, Mr Walz was taking over a job staffing a storeroom and would soon be moving to Alliance, Nebraska.
A separate article from April 1989 reported that he was planning to travel to China in early August the same year – roughly two months after the protests were crushed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Mr Walz repeated his claims that he was in the region during the protests five years later in a radio interview.
“I was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when, of course, Tiananmen Square happened. “And I was in China after that,” he said.
“It was very strange because, of course, all outside transmissions were blocked – Voice of America – and, of course, there was no, no phones or email or anything.
“So I was kind of out of touch. It took me a month to know the Berlin Wall had fallen when I was living there.”
Confronted about his statements during Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Mr Walz said he could be a “knucklehead at times”.
He said he “misspoke” over his repeated claims that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests, but added: “I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest.”
A source close to Mr Walz had previously not specifically refuted the claims when they spoke to CNN.
“The point Governor Walz is making when he discusses this is that some folks in the World Teach program discussed dropping out after Tiananmen Square, but he continued on with the program,” they said.
“He believed it was important for the Chinese people to learn about American democracy and American history.”
Republicans have painted Kamala Harris’ running mate as a serial liar after he falsely claimed to have carried weapons “in war”.
Mr Walz retired from his battalion two months before it was alerted that it would be deployed to Iraq in July 2005. He later claimed that his comments about carrying “weapons in war” were made in reference to the aftermath of a school shooting.
Mr Walz also claimed that his wife conceived their children via IVF, at a time when access to the procedure has become a key issue on the campaign trail, but his wife later said that they used a different, less invasive process known as intrauterine insemination, or IUI.
Gregg Peppin, a Minnesota-based Republican strategist, urged Mr Vance to raise Mr Walz’s claims about Tiananmen Square in their debate on Tuesday.
“This is yet another example of falsehoods and phoney bravado from Walz,” he told The Telegraph.
“His mouth gets in front of his brain and raises serious questions about his governing style and whether he is fit to be anywhere near the Oval Office.
“Senator Vance should prosecute the case against Walz today not only on this lie, but on Walz’s hard-Left progressive record.”
The Harris-Walz campaign has been approached for comment.
The post Tim Walz accused of lying about where he was during Tiananmen Square massacre appeared first on The Telegraph.
