What Really Happened On Tim Walz’s Trips to China

Tim Walz would like to take Donald Trump to China — or at least that is what he said during this week’s vice-presidential debate.

Walz taught in southern China as a post-grad in his twenties. And later, as a high school teacher in Nebraska and Minnesota, he led students on field trips to the country from 1994 to 2005. “I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us,” he said during the debate. “I guarantee you he wouldn’t be praising Xi Jinping about Covid, and I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing.”

So, what would Trump have learned on a field trip to China with Walz? Conversations with four students and a chaperone who traveled with Walz in 2005 gave us a glimpse into the itinerary that might have been.

Trump would have traveled along with 23 students on a two-week trek across the country, from a local school in South China to the Forbidden City in Beijing. He wouldn’t have appeared in any press conferences with government leaders. But he would have learned how to haggle with street vendors. He’d have figured out how to communicate through soccer when words fail. He would have learned to appreciate people from another culture — chatting with them on overnight trains, riding bikes alongside their monuments, seeing their towns and homes up close. And he’d even have gotten some pampering at a group foot massage Walz booked for everyone.

Republicans have pointed to these trips as evidence that Walz is soft on Beijing, and even a potential threat to national security.

But Walz’s former students, many of whom later volunteered for his Congressional campaign, describe him as a sometimes goofy teacher who subscribed to a particular philosophy around China: The oppressive Chinese Communist Party should be treated with great suspicion and scrutiny; but the regular, everyday people living under that repression should be treated with empathy, just like everyone else. They may speak another language and live on the other side of the world, he taught his students, but in the ways that really matter, they might as well be your neighbor.

At a school in Southern China, the students played a game of friendly soccer with Chinese students on a dirt field — the Americans in their t-shirts and the Chinese in sports jerseys. They managed to communicate via hand gestures and kicking the ball.

“This [soccer game] was what this trip to me encapsulated: The world, you think to a certain extent when you’re young, that everybody is so foreign and different from you, but then you go to a foreign country, thousands of miles away, and you’re all playing soccer together with them,” Ross Pomeroy, a student on the trip, said. “We can’t speak the same language verbally, but physically, culturally, we have shared bonds.”

Walz led the students on a trip that exposed them to vastly different parts of China, from the bustling streets of Hong Kong — where it was always important to lowball vendors with high-priced souvenirs, Walz told them — to the hills of rural southern China: “We saw the wood huts. We saw people on the farms. And that was an eye-opening experience,” former Walz student Will Handke told me. “It’s one thing to conceptually think that there’s something different out there, but then you see it, and you feel it, and you smell it, and you see the other people, and you see that they have the same smile on their faces.”

Walz pushed them to explore beyond their comfort zones, even booking a group foot massage. “At the time, I was like, ‘Oh this is something that only women did,’ so it was just eye-opening for me,” said Matt Olson, another student on the 2005 trip. “It was funny that all of us did it together. It removed a little bit of the stereotype-ness.”

The group hit all the major tourist attractions, like the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum was particularly exciting for students who had taken Walz’s global geography class: They’d seen the near-life-size figure of a terracotta warrior by his desk countless times throughout the school year — and now they were finally seeing the real deal.

Perhaps even more memorable than the historic sites, students said, were the overnight trains that shuttled the group from city to city. The students packed into train compartments, often shared with Chinese passengers. Kids ran up to the students, shy but eager to practice the English they had learned in school. Passengers asked for pictures to remember their journey with the foreigners.

Some locals chafed at the Americans and would shoot them dirty looks. Walz did not let that slide. When one passenger badmouthed the students lining up on the train, Walz turned to the man, smiled and shot back a response in fluent Mandarin to everybody’s surprise.

The Chinese passenger simply looked at Walz in shock before leaving the students alone.

The final stop of the trip was Beijing. China’s sprawling capital was known for its historic landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, nestled within modern skyscrapers and global chains like Starbucks. It was also the city where the Tiananmen Square Massacre had happened 16 years before.

Although Walz has been criticized for falsely saying he was in Hong Kong when the massacre happened — he admitted during the debate that he “misspoke” about the timing and that he was in China later that summer — there is no doubt that the student-led demonstration left an “ enduring influence ” on him, as he described it in a 2014 congressional hearing. Hundreds, and by some estimates even thousands, of people died fighting for their democratic rights, as tanks from the People’s Liberation Army drove down the streets and soldiers opened fire on protesters.

Walz had placed a picture of the famous Tank Man — a protester who defiantly stood in front of a line of tanks that had mowed down Tiananmen Square demonstrators the previous day — by his classroom door. In his global geography class, which many of the students on the trip had taken before leaving for China, he taught about the Tiananmen Square Massacre while explaining the push for democracy and rebellion against authoritarianism in Asia.

“It felt eerie and sad, and I was just trying to understand the situation that occurred. It’s just kind of gut-wrenching and hard to believe that it got to that point,” Olson said of his visit to a place that now looked like an innocuous concrete plaza to any other clueless bystander. “[Walz] knew a lot about it. You could tell the passion that he had about it.”

“I see a lot of demonization of China today,” Pomeroy added. “Separate the government from the people, because the actual people — everyday people that we saw — they weren’t much different than us. They were just normal people. It’s a pity that a lot of the Chinese people have to live in such an authoritarian, repressive, communist regime, which is the ultimate tragedy of China right now.”

At the square, there were no grand lectures or history lessons. No speech about the fight for democracy or the consequences of brutal oppression. Walz simply let the students take in the moment — and then took the trip’s group photo at the spot.