Tim Walz brings extensive China experience to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign — which his political allies see as an asset, but his opponents see as a liability.
The Minnesota governor’s resume includes a year teaching in China just after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. He visited more than 30 times in the years that followed, organizing student trips.
Within hours of Harris’ Tuesday announcement of her choice of a running mate and twice on the same day, JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, described Walz as soft on Beijing.
“She selected Tim Walz, a guy who wants to ship more manufacturing jobs to China,” he said.
Other political allies of former President Donald Trump said Walz’s pick would please Beijing.
“Communist China is very happy with @GovTimWalz as Kamala’s VP pick,” Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence under Trump, posted on X.
Walz made no mention of China at his debut campaign appearance on Tuesday but in 2016, the then-U.S. representative spoke about living in and visiting China.
“If someone tells you, and they’re an expert on China, they’re probably not telling you the truth, because it’s a complex country, but it’s critically important for us,” he said in a 2016 interview with Agri-Pulse Communications.
“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree, and I think we need to stand firm on what they’re doing in the South China Sea. But there’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”
And speaking with VOA in 2014, he described what it was like to live there following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
“It was very powerful, and I’m certainly honored to have been there and to see the spirit of the Chinese people about trying to be very proud of their country but understanding that freedom needs to, it needs to shine,” he said.
‘I think he might be friendly’
In the hours after his debut on the campaign trail, Walz and his travels in China quickly became a trending topic on Chinese social media. A Weibo page with posts on Walz’s time in China had nearly 15 million views.
One netizen said, “I think he might be friendly to China.”
Other Chinese internet users thought he would take a harder line. While in Congress, Walz co-sponsored resolutions critical of China’s human rights record. One Chinese nationalist military historian on Weibo said the Democrats “want to destroy China.”
Others commented on what Walz called his “life-changing lunch” with the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled leader. One Weibo user said the former teacher in China looked like an American spy.
That user did not elaborate. Walz’s U.S. government service includes a 24-year career in the Minnesota Army National Guard, 12 years as a U.S. congressman and five years in his current job as governor of Minnesota.
Keen China watchers say that so far, Beijing has not publicly reacted.
Kaiser Kuo, who hosts the Sinica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, says Walz’s directness may prove to have influence among the Chinese public.
“He’s been very forthright in his criticisms of China’s human rights record, and I think he’s done that from a position that is maybe more credible because of his conspicuous earnestness and his sincerity, and the embodiment of the kind of values that he purports to be wanting to spread to China,” Kuo said.
Kuo noted that in a statement Walz read into the record while serving on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, “He very explicitly said anything the United States does won’t really change what happens on the ground in China — that only the Chinese people can do that. So, I think he’s aware of the limitations of this. But I think like all Americans — I would hope — he is very committed to democracy.”
Other China analysts said that a Harris-Walz administration is expected to largely continue the toughened China policies of the Biden and Trump administrations. Under President Joe Biden, a stream of Cabinet officials visited China, and Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in person in late 2023.
“If he [Walz] should win, and he becomes vice president … I think this should be seen around the world, in China, in Asia, as continuity in the complex decades-long U.S. policy of recognizing the need to deal with China as a major power in the world, not that part of the world – but also the differences in in values, especially when it comes to democratization,” said Jim Fallows, an author and journalist who has written two books on China and was a speechwriter for former President Jimmy Carter.
Fallows, who also lived in China for several years, said Walz’s recollections about living there are largely similar to those of other Americans, “where they recognize the many areas of fellow feeling between Chinese and American people and institutions but also the areas of tension which he’s expressed.”
If elected, Walz will be the highest-level U.S. official to have lived in China since former President George H.W. Bush, who served as a top diplomatic official in the country for a little over a year starting in 1974.
Paris Huang, Bill Ide, Wenhao Ma and Katherine Michaelson contributed to this report from Washington.
