Tim Walz has been attacked from all angles by Republicans in the two days since he was unveiled as Kamala Harris’s running mate to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance in November.
The mild-mannered Midwesterner and Minnesota governor, a 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard and former high school teacher, has been called everything from a “radical leftist” to “Tampon Tim” as the opposition scrambles to define and discredit him in the eyes of voters.
So far, little has stuck, prompting Trump’s allies to turn to Walz’s ties to China as a fresh avenue of attack.
“This is a ticket that wants this country to go communist immediately if not sooner,” Trump told Fox and Friends in a phone interview on Wednesday morning – one of a half-dozen scattergun critiques he fired on Walz.
On the campaign trail, Vance, with whom the governor will compete to peel away crucial Rust Belt votes, has already accused him of wanting to “ship more manufacturing jobs to China”.
And on social media, Richard Grenell, Trump’s former US ambassador to Germany, posted in response to the 60-year-old’s selection for the Democratic ticket: “Communist China is very happy with Tim Walz as Kamala’s VP pick. No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz.”
In China itself, local internet users have even speculated that Walz was an undercover CIA agent responsible for stirring up the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, according to The Times.
It’s an outlandish claim which appears to be premised solely on the fact that Walz happened to be in China at the time.
So what is the truth behind Walz’s links with China?
It’s true that the Nebraska native, then 25 and a novice teacher, taught English and American history and culture in Foshan in the southeastern Guangdong province between 1989 and 1990 as part of the WorldTeach program.
But there is no evidence that he engaged in any political activity during his time there – coming decades before his foray into politics.
Yet, the trip clearly made an impression on him and the young educator told The Star Herald newspaper in 1990 that his stay was “one of the best things” he had ever done. “If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish,” Walz said of the Chinese people.
In a later interview with The Hill in 2007, he remembered: “China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went.”
Years after that first trip, Walz and his wife Gwen set up a business called Educational Travel Adventures to organize summer trips to China for American high school students. They even chose the country for their honeymoon in 1994. The couple continued to run an exchange program there as part of the venture until 2003.
After entering the halls of 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 of Representatives 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.
However, unlike Trump, who started a punishing trade war with China during his presidency by raising import tariffs on Chinese goods, Walz has advocated for less “adversarial” relations with Beijing and greater cooperation in the wider interest of international harmony.
“I think Walz is going to put a lot of people who care a lot about American foreign policy in this part of the world at ease, knowing that there is someone on the ticket who is informed, has spent time in the region, and is not starting from square one when it comes to learning about American foreign policy in East Asia,” Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University, told Voice of America this week.
For its part, Xi’s administration has refused to comment on Walz’s ascent other than to say that it is hoping for better relations with Washington in November – whichever side wins.