Tim Walz’s Relationship With China, Explained

C hina clearly holds a special place in Tim Walz’s heart: The Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate speaks some Chinese . He’s traveled there some 30 times, including for his honeymoon. And he’s often spoken about the country and worked on legislation related to it.

But since he was announced as Kamala Harris’ running mate on Tuesday, Walz’s China ties have come under scrutiny from critics who have painted him as sympathetic to Beijing as politicians on both sides of the aisle in Washington seemingly compete to appear tougher on the U.S.’s biggest geopolitical rival.

Read More: Where Tim Walz Stands on the Issues

Make America Great Again Inc., a PAC supporting the Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, posted on social media a video clip of Walz saying “I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship, I totally disagree.”

“Tim Walz doesn’t see China as a problem,” James Hutton, a former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs during the Trump administration, posted on X . “Communist China is very happy with @GovTimWalz as Kamala’s VP pick,” posted Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany and acting Director of National Intelligence during the Trump administration. “No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) posted : “Tim Walz owes the American people an explanation about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China.”

Others, however, see Walz’s experience with China less as a liability and more as an asset. “So he knows a lot about it. That’s great,” former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations, posted in response to observations about Walz’s history with China.

Taiwan-based political science professor Lev Nachman also characterized Walz’s experience with China as positive, posting that it “means he is likely to approach U.S.-[China] relations with a much more nuanced point of view, one that humanizes Chinese people and does not equate them to their government.”

That aligns with how Walz himself has described his stance on the country for which he has been consistently critical on a number of issues, particularly human rights, while also expressing hope and optimism about its people and their potential. “If someone tells you 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,” Walz said in the same 2016 interview that the Trump-supporting PAC excerpted. “I think we need to stand firm on what they’re doing in the South China Sea,” he said, referencing one of the many fronts of the U.S.-China rivalry, “but there’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”

While reports in Chinese state media noted Walz’s frequent visits to China and past advocacy for “fostering cultural exchanges,” there were no mentions of his human rights-related criticisms. And on Chinese social media, reaction has been mixed. “If Tim Walz didn’t have this connection with China, Harris might be tougher on China,” Qiu Zhenhai, political commentator and founder of the Hong Kong-based think tank Center for Globalization Hong Kong, said in a post on Weibo , adding that Walz’s dynamic with Harris would need further observation. Another user cautioned : “Isn’t it too naive to think that, just because he taught in China and had his honeymoon there, he would be dovish towards China?”

Here’s what to know about Walz’s history with—and stances on—China.

Visiting China

Walz’s first international flight was to China. As a fresh college graduate in 1989, “as a part of the first government sanctioned groups of American educators to teach in China through a program at Harvard University,” according to his congressional biography , Walz traveled to Guangdong province, where he taught at a local high school . It was the same year that the Tiananmen Square massacre saw the Chinese government brutally crack down on pro-democracy protesters.

“I remember waking up and seeing the news on June 4 that the unthinkable had happened,” he told reporters in 2014 at a White House event commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre, adding that the event prompted many of his American teaching colleagues to leave China. “I felt it was more important than ever to go, to make sure that story was told, and to let Chinese people know we were standing there, we were with them.”

“China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went,” Walz explained to the Hill in 2007 of his decision to spend the year in a country that was just starting to open up. He said his Chinese students gave him the nickname “Fields of China” in reference to the vastness of his kindness. (They also called him “big-nosed one” and “foreign devil,” which he said were not meant as insults.)

When Walz returned to the U.S. in 1990, he told a local Nebraskan newspaper that the Chinese he met “are such kind, generous, capable people” and that they simply lacked “proper leadership.”

The Tiananmen Square massacre clearly resonated with Walz, who got married to Minnesotan fellow teacher Gwen Whipple on its fifth anniversary in 1994. “He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” Gwen told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald before their wedding. Together, the couple had founded Educational Travel Adventures, a company that organized annual summer excursions to China for American high school students from 1994 until 2003. (Their honeymoon doubled as one such excursion with dozens of students.)

Walz’s frequent trips to China have fueled unfounded speculation that he was a spy or nefariously linked to the Chinese state—a claim that was amplified in a Fox News segment by host Jesse Watters on Tuesday: “I’m sure he paid for all those trips himself on a teacher’s salary,” Watters said facetiously. “Walz spent his honeymoon in China. He’s being groomed by the Chinese,” Watters asserted. “Now, if I was the FBI, I’d do a background check just to be safe.”

Criticizing China’s record on human rights

While Walz has spoken fondly of his time in China, during his political career, which began with a run for Congress in 2006, he has both publicly condemned China’s human rights record and backed House resolutions expressing concern on issues from political persecutions to alleged organ harvesting in China.

From 2007 to 2018 , Walz served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), which monitors legal and human rights developments in China. Due to his years of work on China issues—and his teaching stint in Guangdong—Walz was once described as a “ stalwart ” on the commission by then-chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Walz has consistently supported political freedom in China, including cosponsoring a 2009 resolution recognizing the Tiananmen Square massacre’s 20th anniversary as well as another resolution supporting human rights activists Huang Qi and Tan Zuoren , who were jailed by authorities after investigating the collapse of school buildings in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake .

As international concern grew around Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer and activist who was detained after he exposed abuses by local officials, Walz testified at a CECC hearing in 2011: “I applaud the accomplishments of the Chinese people and recognize that some in the Chinese government advocate for greater rule of law. But, we cannot believe China is serious about the rule of law while Chen Guangcheng and his family are being forcefully held and abused.”

“We cannot believe China is serious about human rights while it flagrantly violates its own laws and its international human rights commitments,” he emphasized.

Walz also called for the release of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo , and, after Liu died a political prisoner in 2017, Walz cosponsored a resolution to honor Liu’s legacy.

In 2015, Walz co-sponsored a resolution expressing concern about reports of Chinese state-sanctioned organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience—an issue that remains of concern to the CECC and Congress .

“I think the idea was, with a free-market economy, we would see a more opening of the Chinese grip on social life and on human rights,” Walz said at a 2016 congressional hearing on human rights in China. “That simply has not occurred.”

More recently, he’s also criticized China for not opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine. “We need to cooperate with China on issues such as climate change and agricultural production,” he told Japanese news outlet Nikkei in an interview last year, “but I’m disappointed with China’s recent performance—on the Ukraine issue, they are on Russia’s side.”

Touching China’s touchy topics: Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

As a teacher, Walz has made understanding totalitarianism an important part of his studies and lessons. He earned a Master of Science degree in educational leadership from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2001, according to Politico . His thesis, according to Jewish Telegraphic Agency , was about genocide. And in a 2008 New York Times article , his former students described how he encouraged them to analyze the factors that can lead countries toward ethnic cleansing, something China faces accusations of today when it comes to minority communities, including Tibetans .

Since he was a lawmaker, Walz has been vocal about his support for Tibetan autonomy—a movement led by the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader whom Chinese authorities have long accused of inciting separatism and unrest in the Himalayan autonomous region of Tibet.

Besides meeting with the Dalai Lama, which Walz once described as “ life-changing ,” Walz has called attention to Tibetan political prisoners held by Chinese authorities, and in 2016, he welcomed Lobsang Sangay, Prime Minister of Tibet’s government-in-exile, to his congressional office for a meeting with Minnesota high school students.

Walz was also part of a 2015 congressional delegation that visited Tibet, where he described being “in the deepest enclaves of Chinese government with some of their highest level officials having a debate about the Dalai Lama.”

Walz has long maintained the importance of “dialogue” and described the one he had then as “healthy” and “one that absolutely has to happen” during a press conference after the visit.

“This relationship [with China] is too critically important; it’s too critically important on trade; it’s too critically important on climate change; it’s too critically important on national security, issues of containment of terrorism and everything else that’s involved.”

Throughout his political career, Walz has also expressed support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and its proponents.

In 2016—in the wake of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution but before the widespread pro-democracy protests that swept the city in 2019 —Walz warned fellow lawmakers during a congressional hearing that “Hong Kong and the basic rule of law that was drawn out is under assault.”

In 2017, Walz posted on X a photo with prominent then-student activist Joshua Wong , who has been repeatedly imprisoned in Hong Kong over a slew of cases related to his activism. “Political prosecutions can’t silence the spirit of self-determination,” Walz said, extending his support to Wong. In another post, he called Wong “a true champion for democracy in China.”

Jeffrey Ngo, an activist-historian who is a senior policy and research fellow with the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, said in a post on X on Tuesday that Walz had been instrumental in keeping the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act afloat before it was passed by Congress in 2019. “We knocked on every door when the [bill] lacked momentum. Only Walz answered his: At its absolute lowest point in 2017–18, he was the sole House Democrat willing to keep co-sponsoring the bill—seemingly a fruitless endeavor—with [New Jersey Republican Rep. Christopher] Smith,” Ngo recounted.

While Walz has not explicitly expressed a position on the politics of Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing asserts sovereignty over and that the Biden administration has vowed to defend in the case of an invasion, Minnesota has maintained good relations with Taipei throughout his governorship.

In 2021, when a train-truck collision in Hualien county left dozens dead, Walz reached out to the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Organization, the island’s de facto embassy, to express his condolences. He also met with members of Taiwan’s agriculture industry in 2022 to boost the trade partnership with Minnesota.

Focusing on trade and the South China Sea

In a 2016 interview with Agri-Pulse , a Washington-based agriculture news site, then-Rep. Walz said that the U.S. should care about and stand firmly against China’s actions in the South China Sea—the hotly-contested waterway that China claims virtually all of and has engaged in increasingly hostile confrontations with U.S. allies over.

“It is our business what happens in the South China Sea because freedom of navigation to move our crops and to move our products is critically important to our economy as well as our national security,” Walz said at the time.

That same year, Walz co-sponsored the POSTURE Act opposing military personnel cuts, arguing that the number of U.S. troops should be maintained to deter security challenges including Russia, Islamist extremism, and China’s island expansion in the South China Sea . “Those adversaries who think that this is the time to do something with this Nation need to be sent a strong message that we are as strong as ever,” he said during a House session, urging support for the bill.

Trade has long been a key area of focus for Walz, who has supported maintaining, with regulations, a healthy U.S.-China commerce relationship. Even before he became a politician, when he was a sixth-grade social studies teacher in Nebraska, Walz explained to his students who he helped exchange letters with children in China, according to a 1991 local news article , why their governments were at odds: an unfair trade balance. “The Chinese government wants us to buy what they sell, but won’t buy what we sell,” he said.

As a member of the CECC, Walz participated in discussions of issues like China’s compliance with international trade rules and how that relates to U.S. interests . Describing the work of the CECC, Walz said in 2016 that the group’s focus was that “we’ll trade with China but they have to play by the rules, both from an environmental, from a fair trade, and also from a human rights perspective.”

And in 2019, as governor of Minnesota, he publicly urged then-President Trump to end the trade war with China, arguing that it was “hindering our economy’s growth and weakening our country’s prosperity.” Minnesota’s agricultural sector had been hit hard by a slump in exports to China of commodities like soy beans and pork.

“There’s just no substitute for 1.6 billion consumers, who are hungry to get our China trade negotiations normalized,” he later told reporters after a trip to Japan, where he said that the slack left by falling Chinese demand was too much for Minnesota’s other trade partners to pick up. “There's not enough market in the rest of the world to absorb our capacity.”

“This is a guy who has proposed shipping more manufacturing jobs to China,” Vance said Tuesday, reacting to Harris’ selection of Walz as her running mate. Vance has argued that Walz’s progressive energy policies and ambitious climate goals will send manufacturing jobs to China.

Walz, for his part, has tried to link his climate efforts to domestic job creation, telling TIME last year that “the surest way to get people to buy in is to create a job that pays well in their community.”

In the same 1991 newspaper detailing Walz’s pen pal program, Walz explained his philosophy on distinguishing between other nations’ policies and people, and the importance of interacting on a person-to-person level—an approach that U.S.-China diplomacy experts largely support . “That’s the reason we study geography and history, to learn about other people. Geography and history are not just about wars, dead people and old buildings,” Walz said. “The best way to study about people is to hear them tell what it is like where they live.”

Contact us at letters@time.com .