Taipei, Taiwan — From teaching at a high school in China to his experience serving on a key congressional committee that focuses on relations between Beijing and Washington, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz has a decades-long connection with China dating back to the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
As an educator, Walz taught American History, culture, and English to Chinese students at the Foshan No.1 High School in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in 1989, the year that saw hundreds of thousands of Chinese students protesting against the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Tiananmen Square.
“China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went,” Walz said in a 2007 interview with The Hill, a Washington D.C.-based news website. During his one-year teaching stint in China, Walz was nicknamed “Fields of China” by his students due to his kindness.
His time in China had an impact on his perspectives of Chinese people’s lives under the ruling Communist Party.
“If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish,” he said in an interview with the Star Herald in 1990, describing teaching in China as “one of the best things” he has ever done.
His interest in China didn’t stop there. Upon returning to the United States, Walz and his wife set up a company named “Educational Travel Adventures” to coordinate summer trips to China for American high school students.
Five years after the Tiananmen Square protests and the Chinese government’s violent crackdown, Walz returned to China with his wife for their honeymoon and they brought along two American high school tour groups. Walz continued running the summer exchange program to China for American students with his wife until 2003.
Advocating human rights in China
After becoming a member of Congress in 2007, Walz continued to focus on issues related to China. During his time in Congress, Walz served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which focuses exclusively on human rights issues in the country.
Walz quickly established himself as a vocal critic of the Chinese government, holding regular meetings with high-profile activists from China and Hong Kong, including prominent Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong and Tibet’s spiritual leader Dalai Lama.
In an interview with VOA in 2014, Walz recounted his impression of witnessing the student-led protest in Tiananmen Square unfold. “I remembered waking up and seeing the news on June Fourth that the unthinkable had happened,” he said.
While most Americans at the time decided to leave China due to security concerns following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Walz said he felt it was “more important than ever to go” to China because he wanted to ensure that “the story was told” and let the Chinese people know that the outside world was with them.
In addition to engaging with activists from China and Hong Kong, Walz also co-sponsored several resolutions on key human rights issues in China, including demanding the release of Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and Chinese activist Huang Qi, as well as co-signing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in 2017.
In one of his congressional remarks in 2016, Walz highlighted the importance of having “constructive dialogues” with Beijing to ensure “the preservation of traditional Tibetan culture and Tibet’s fragile ecology.”
“The U.S. was founded on the ideas of universal freedom, and I believe that we must continue to urge the Chinese government to provide less regulated religious freedom to the Tibetans,” he said at the time.
Foreign policy boost
In addition to being a vocal critique of China’s human rights record, Walz also expressed concerns about China’s attempt to expand its presence in the South China Sea in 2016, citing Beijing’s efforts to build artificial islands in the disputed water as the reason to oppose Washington’s attempt to reduce military spending.
Despite his strong stance on China’s human rights record and military posture, Walz continued to stress the importance of maintaining cooperation with China. “I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” he said in a video interview with Agri-Pulse Communications.
“I think we need to stand firm on what they are doing in the South China Sea, but there [are] many areas of cooperation that we can work on,” Walz added.
Some analysts say Walz’s deep connections to China and track record in U.S.-China diplomacy could potentially help the Democratic presidential pair make more informed decisions on foreign policy, especially on issues related to China.
“I think [his emergence as Democratic vice-presidential nominee] is going to put a lot of people who care a lot about American foreign policy in this part of the world at ease, knowing that there is someone on the ticket who is informed, has spent time in the region, and is not starting from square one when it comes to learning about American foreign policy in East Asia,” said Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University.
He said since Walz has expressed many humanistic views of the Chinese people, Tibetan people, and Hong Kongers, the Minnesota governor could add more nuance to the policy debate related to China in the United States.
“He may be able to articulate the need to push back against China’s authoritarianism and human rights violations in different parts of the world in a way that doesn’t vilify Chinese citizens or doesn’t lean antagonistically in this overtly scare tactic rhetoric that I think a lot of U.S.-China discourse has turned into in the U.S.,” Nachman told VOA by phone.
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