Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s elevation to the national stage as running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris has suddenly put him in the spotlight. Walz had a low national profile until a successful behind-the-scenes strategy led him to be considered for Democrats’ suddenly vacant second spot.
One of the striking elements of Walz’s biography is his unusually deep connections to China. Walz first visited the country in 1989, just months after the Tiananmen Square protests, and returned to the country some 30 times afterward. As an educator and then a small business owner, he facilitated student groups’ trips to China. As a legislator, he served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights and the rule of law in the country, and co-sponsored resolutions urging the release of democratic activist Liu Xiaobo and remembering the Tiananmen Square victims.
Not all the attention to Walz’s China record has been positive. Republican and conservative figures have sought to portray Walz’s China ties as dangerous. On X, for example, Sen. Marco Rubio accused Walz of being a Chinese asset—“an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders”—who would “allow China to steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.”
But Rubio’s attack has it precisely backward. Walz’s record is that of a measured critic of the Chinese Communist Party—prone neither to exaggeration nor accommodation. Nor is this a pose cooked up by spin doctors in the past few weeks. Small-town Nebraska newspaper articles—published well before Walz had any political ambitions—demonstrate that his professed affection for the Chinese people and culture has been matched by a longstanding criticism of the country’s rulers.
Back in the 1980s and ’90s, it didn’t take a lot to make the local papers. Walz, for instance, was once photographed for the Alliance Times-Herald—“Box Butte County’s Only Family-Owned Newspaper”—for a National Guard project: painting and repairing trash cans in the town center. (The photograph is about as exciting as the description suggests.)
The regular stuff of small-town news reporting—council meetings, 4-H club events, church announcements—was occasionally enlivened by stories about exceptional events. One such, it turned out, was Walz’s decision to teach in China as part of a program run by WorldTeach, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. (Many news accounts, at the time and later, describe WorldTeach as a Harvard-run program, but it’s more accurate to say it was founded by Harvard students.)
“I’ve always had a real interest in travel, and feel this is a golden opportunity to see a culture that’s 3,000 years old,” Walz, then a senior at Chadron State College, told the Chadron Record in an article announcing his selection in 1989.
Walz would be going under less than glamorous conditions. It was the first year that WorldTeach would make placements in China, the Record reported, and that meant participants had to be resourceful: “They said we’ll basically have to solve our own problems,” Walz said. He said he had to raise $2,500 for his transportation, health insurance, and orientation costs—and, once in China, he would only earn $100 per month in salary (although that was, the Record noted, “about twice the amount generally paid [to] Chinese teachers”).
Although the crackdown on protesters in June 1989 led Walz to wonder whether the trip would go on, the program remained in place. After orientation in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China, he traveled to his teaching site: a senior middle school in Foshan, a then-rapidly growing city in central Guangdong Province in southern China. There, he taught U.S. history and culture and English to classes of 65 students each from December 1989 to December 1990, according to a 1990 article in the Chadron Record. (Walz’s Midwestern-accentuated U.S. English was a change for the students, whose previous instructor was British, according to a 1994 article in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald.)
His trip was big enough news that the Record printed excerpts from a letter Walz wrote to a Chadron State faculty member while he was abroad. Walz wrote that he was “being treated like a king.” He was, he wrote, “totally responsible for my curriculum. But I’m managing.”
After he returned, Walz was invited to speak about his time at his alma mater, Chadron State. At about the same time, an interview about his year in China ran in local papers. His enthusiasm was obvious: “No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again,” Walz told the Record in 1990. “They gave me more gifts than I could bring home. It was an excellent experience.” (In 2024, the New York Post twisted this line as evidence that Walz had “fawned over Communist China.”)
Yet in context, it’s clear that Walz was no dupe. During his teaching year, he visited Beijing (a 40-hour trip by rail) and saw Tiananmen Square, according to the Record. As much as Walz loved China and the Chinese people, his attitude toward the Chinese Communist Party was bluntly critical. Tiananmen Square, he told the Record, “will always have a lot of bitter memories for the people.” (Walz later chose June 6 as his wedding date so he could “have a date he’ll always remember,” according to his wife.)
The problem with China, Walz observed, wasn’t its people but the government. “If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what [Chinese people] could accomplish,” he told the Record. “They are such kind, generous, capable people. They just gave and gave and gave to me. Going there was one of the best things I have ever done.”
Walz viewed China’s population as eager to leave its Communist-run society. “Many of the students want to come to America to study,” he told the Record. “They don’t feel there is much opportunity for them in China.” He mentioned that during one of his trips to nearby Macau, then still a Portuguese colony, the government granted amnesty to Chinese immigrants living in the colony illegally, triggering a stampede by tens of thousands of Chinese who wanted residency in the West.
The trip shaped Walz’s career as an educator. Within a few months of his return, Walz had found a job as a social studies teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, a town whose population was then just under 10,000 people. He created a pen-pal program linking his students to Chinese middle-school students at his old teaching placement, where a friend of his worked. The program was reported on the front page of the Alliance Times-Herald in 1991.
Walz, who must have been a dynamic teacher, used the exchange of letters to not only bridge cultural gaps but also demonstrate the stakes of then-acrimonious U.S.-China government relations to his students. Walz pointedly described the politics of the countries’ then-seemingly large trade imbalance (a fraction of what it is now) to the Times-Herald: “The Chinese government wants us to buy what they sell, but won’t buy what we sell.”
Soon, Walz was leading groups of students to China. The first visit was in July 1993, when he took 25 Alliance High School students on a trip partly funded by the Chinese government, although the students and sponsors, including Walz, had to cover costs of $1,580 each, according to an article in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald; Walz helped by raising funds from local businesses. (In a rare criticism of an aspect of Chinese culture, rather than the Chinese Communist Party, Walz responded to one student’s interest in hearing Chinese opera by saying he’d “rather eat glass” than see another Chinese opera.) Walz’s honeymoon with his wife, a fellow teacher, the next year involved two student trips to China, according to the Star-Herald. Later, he and his wife would start a business to promote similar exchanges.
For all his fondness toward China, Walz’s descriptions of its people at times reflected the prevailing stereotypes of the time. “The students are almost too well behaved,” he wrote in his letter from China that was excerpted in the Record in 1989. In a 1994 profile ahead of his honeymoon in China, Walz told the Star-Herald that it had been hard to memorize names and tell his students apart (although he also noted that Chinese students thought all Americans looked alike.) To the Times-Herald in 1993, he described his students as not overly creative but industrious: “[T]here was never even any unfinished homework,” he recalled. And, for Walz, mostly used to small-town life, the sheer scale of China was astonishing: “The people were the best part, and the worst part was the number of people.”
The contemporaneous (and surprisingly extensive) record of how Walz’s time in China influenced him clearly rejects the idea that Walz was groomed or otherwise misled by his time in the country. He was an earnest, young observer of a society and government radically unlike his own. After repeated exposure, however, China became increasingly familiar to him. His opinions about the Chinese people and their government derived from firsthand observations, filtered through his own background and reading.
Neither a hawk nor a dove, Walz approached China as a student and a teacher—an owl, to steal a metaphor. Throughout these early interviews, his insistence on the separation between a people and their government—and his repeated criticism of the Chinese government—was plain. So was his emphasis on the importance of democracy and recognizing where the United States fell short.
People change, and seeking clues to how a potential Vice President Walz would act based on how high school teacher Walz approached his lessons is clearly perilous. Still, it seems clear that Walz values facts, and in particular experience, rather than theory or ideology; that he has deeply held core beliefs about China’s people and government set in the era of Tiananmen; and that his commitment to promoting human rights—and U.S. economic interests in trade negotiations—is longstanding.
With that background, leavened by subsequent experience on China issues as a member of Congress, it seems more likely than not that Walz would be neither inflexibly hostile nor naïve about relations with Beijing.
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