This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
June 4 this year was a significant day for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Not only did it mark 35 years since the 1989 massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square in China, where he taught English and American history as a young college graduate the same year.
It was also his 30th wedding anniversary.
But that was no coincidence for the 60-year-old who on Tuesday was selected as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate for November’s election with former President Donald Trump.
“He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” Walz’s wife, Gwen, told the Scottsbluff Sun-Herald before their 1994 wedding.
The Walzs also took their two-week “honeymoon” to China – with some 60 American high-school students in tow – for “sightseeing and classes on culture, education and history,” the newspaper reported.
After settling in Minnesota, he and his wife established a private company that organized annual summer trips to China for American high school students, further solidifying their ties to the east.
It was part of Walz’s foresight about China’s growing significance.
“China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went,” Walz said of his ties to the country in an interview with The Hill in 2007 after his election to the U.S. Congress in Minnesota in the 2006 midterms.
Congressional oversight
The Hill in 2007 described Walz as “an accidental politician,” having only entered politics after witnessing a supporter of the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry being “hustled out” of a rally for President George W. Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Yet while Walz had described his time teaching at a school in Guangdong as “an excellent experience” that left him believing “I’ll never be treated that well again,” once in office he became a staunch and outspoken critic of China’s government.
He joined the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, an oversight body created by President Bill Clinton in 2000 in a deal with Congress to approve his decision to admit China to the World Trade Organization despite criticisms of its human rights record.
There he spoke out for the need for the U.S. administrations to continue “dialogue” with the Chinese government to end its human rights abuses against the Tibetan people, whose culture he said cannot be “confined” by Beijing to “a museum or to a market of handicrafts.”
“Renewing dialogue must be genuine and productive, and it cannot be just another guise for wasting time or going through the motions,” Walz said in 2016 following a trip to Tibet, Beijing and Hong Kong.
“The human rights of the Tibetan people must be strengthened and protected,” he said, citing “a life-changing lunch” with the Dalai Lama.
The same year, he also spoke out against reductions in funding for the U.S. military by citing, among other things, “tensions rising with our trading partner, China, and the seeds of potential unrest in the Pacific,” including Beijing building islands in the South China Sea.
Dueling VPs
Walz is also not the only vice presidential hopeful in the 2024 campaign with an outsized focus on China in his political career.
Trump’s handpicked No. 2 for his third campaign for the White House, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has since coming to office in 2022 become one of the most prominent advocates of the view that U.S. support for Ukraine should be reduced to prepare for a possible war with China.
While the 40-year-old Vance was only five when Walz first went to China, their perspectives on how to deal with the rise of America’s biggest geopolitical rival are sure to be teased out in debate. Vance on Tuesday said he “absolutely wants” to debate his opposite number.
For Walz, the separation between the Chinese people and the authoritarian government that dominates their lives is likely to be at the forefront, driven home by the personal and professional ties he has made to the country since he first went there as a college grad.
“If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish,” he told the Scottsbluff Sun-Herald in 1990. “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.”
