Within hours of Tim Walz being declared winner of the Democratic “veepstakes”, Republican accusations that he is pro-China came thick and fast. “Communist China is very happy,” Donald Trump's former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, said on Twitter/X. “No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz.”
Tom Cotton, a Republican senator, said Mr. Walz owed an explanation “about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China”. MAGA War Room, an influential X account supporting Donald Trump, unearthed a 2016 video in which Mr. Walz told the farming policy outlet Agri-Pulse that the US and China did not need to have an “adversarial relationship”.
But what does the record show? Republicans may want to weaponise Mr. Walz's links to China, but it's pretty slim pickings.
Walz's record
Mr Walz's personal relationship with China does indeed extend back decades. It began in 1989 when, fresh out of college, Mr Walz began a Harvard University volunteer programme teaching American history and English at the Foshan No 1 High School in southern China. He later set up a business with his wife Gwen organising annual summer educational trips to China. The venture lasted more than a decade and by his own estimation, Mr Walz returned to the country around 30 times.
But if anything, Mr Walz has been pretty hawkish towards its government, particularly on human rights. As a congressman, he met the Dalai Lama and – before his jailing – the high-profile Hong Kong democracy activist, Joshua Wong. Both men would place at the top of the Chinese government’s list of public enemies. In terms of his congressional record, there is not much for China to like.
He spent over a decade on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China – a body focused on scrutinising the Chinese government’s human rights abuses. In 2016, the same year he met the Dalai Lama, he also invited the then leader of Tibet's government in exile, Lobsang Sangay, into his congressional office to meet a group of Minnesota high-schoolers.
— CutC by bbc.com
