Vice President Kamala Harris's selection of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate was met with glee by many Democrats — but also by Republicans . The Left views Walz as a Midwestern progressive whose Minnesota-nice persona will help Harris win contested states.
But alongside a left-wing record that is sure to attract Republican campaign fire, Walz's deep affection for Communist China is also likely to attract attention.
Shortly after finishing his undergraduate degree in his native Nebraska in 1989, Walz headed to China to teach in a high school in Guangdong Province north of Hong Kong. Asked later about his motivation for this, at a time when few Americans spent time in China, Walz explained , "China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went." Upon his return home, Walz and his wife established a company called Educational Travel Adventures centered on taking American students to China. Together, the couple visited China every summer until 2003, including spending their honeymoon there, much as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) strangely honeymooned in the Soviet Union. By his admission, Walz has visited the country about 30 times. He’s obviously a Sinophile, and he speaks some Mandarin, too.
Many might ask, so what? Although Democrats insist that Walz had advocated human rights and the cause of Tibet, a bugbear with the communists in Beijing, his long history with China raises uncomfortable questions for anybody who understands how China works.
It was an odd choice to visit China in 1989, right as the regime was crushing dissent with tanks in the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre. This did nothing to diminish Walz’s admiration for Beijing. Upon his return from teaching in 1990, he told his local newspaper , "I was treated exceptionally well. There was no anti-Americanism whatsoever." He gushed that the police state had "almost no crime." While Walz allowed that the regime’s massacre of students the year before was less than ideal, he concluded: "If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish. They are such kind, generous, and capable people."
You may recall a famous movie in which Frank Sinatra, playing an American who’s been brainwashed by Chinese communists, recites the line that another man "is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."
While Walz’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party may be nowhere near as dramatic or sinister as that fictional one, we need to ask what’s going on here, particularly in light of Walz's admission in 1993 that his leading of student groups to China was funded by the regime. What did China think it was getting in exchange for this investment? What did Walz think Beijing expected in return?
Put simply, the Chinese communists aren’t running a holiday charity for American tourists. For those communists, nothing comes without a quid pro quo. It’s certain that Walz was vetted by the Ministry of State Security, the regime’s powerful secret police, because that’s how China works. No American would be allowed to run academic exchanges for a couple of decades, on the CCP’s dime, without MSS approval. It just wouldn't happen.
While this doesn’t mean that Walz has a witting relationship with the MSS, what might it know about him after his 30 visits to the country? Three decades ago, a young American with an affection for China, who was also a part-time member of the U.S. military, would have been a tempting recruiting target for Chinese intelligence. Given that Beijing’s spies represent the greatest espionage threat to the United States today, this isn’t any merely academic query.
Moreover, we’re coming off four years of a Democratic president possessing odd, unexplained ties to Beijing, including millions of dollars given to his son by Chinese intelligence . Do we really want someone who may be even more compromised by China in the White House?
Democrats have spent the last nine years obsessing about former President Donald Trump's alleged ties to Moscow, most of which turned out to be imaginary. Would anybody have thought Trump was fit for the Oval Office if he’d visited Russia 30 times, including on the Kremlin’s dime, and gushed about Moscow's glories?
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Since Harris is well known for her love of opposition research, she had to be aware of the governor’s longtime relationship with Beijing. She obviously didn’t care.
If nothing else, however, the choice of Walz as the vice presidential candidate reveals that Democrats’ obsessive interest in counterintelligence was a partisan sham from the start.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
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