Tim Walz Is Fascinated by China--and Disturbed by Its Human-Rights Record - WSJ

The Western world recoiled from China in 1989 after its Tiananmen Square massacre of student activists. Tim Walz followed through with a plan to teach in the country. After graduating from Nebraska’s Chadron State College that year, Walz, then 25 years old, went to teach English and American history to high-school students in Foshan, a city in China’s southern Guangdong province, as part of a yearlong Harvard University program blessed by Washington.

The Minnesota governor and freshly minted Democratic vice-presidential nominee has described the experience as humbling and formative. It was also the first of some 30 visits that Walz has made to China as educator, businessman and politician that took him to far corners of the country and have given him insight into America’s relationship with its biggest global competitor.

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After teaching, Walz formed a travel company and for years led American students on tours to China—one in 1994 doubled as his honeymoon, according to a profile that year in the Star-Herald of Scottsbluff, Neb. In fact, Walz planned his wedding date to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown on June 4: “He wanted to have a date he’d always remember,” his future wife, then known as Gwen Whipple, told the newspaper. As a politician, Walz gained access to more elite members of Chinese society, recalling in one interview “a spirited debate” he held with a former premier of China. And he once posted online a photo of himself meeting Beijing’s Tibetan nemesis, the Dalai Lama, and has met Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong.

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Walz has said his decision to continue with the teaching program despite the crackdown angered some observers. “But it was my belief at that time that the 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,” he told fellow members of a congressional panel in 2014.

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But by 2016 as Chinese leader Xi Jinping consolidated power, Walz also viewed the country’s human-rights situation as “getting worse not better,” he said in Congress that year. He cited the undermining of nongovernmental organizations, Catholics and other religious groups and lawyers, and has expressed concern about China’s treatment of its people in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.

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​One of the few references to Walz’s teaching background in official Chinese statements was a mention in a 2019 Foreign Ministry press release that said the country’s acting Chicago Consul General Liu Jun​ had ​attended Walz’s inauguration as Minnesota governor. In addition to congratulating the governor, the consul expressed hopes Walz could help promote friendly and cooperative ​relations between the state and China, the statement said.

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