Walz, 60, first went to China after graduating college in 1989, teaching English and American history and culture for a year at a high school in the southern Chinese city of Foshan through Harvard’s WorldTeach program.
His arrival coincided with the Chinese authorities’ deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. Tiananmen Square events in the capital, Beijing, seriously strained China’s international relations.
The bloody crackdown had a lasting effect on Walz, who would see it as all the more reason to leave.
“At the time, I believed that diplomacy would happen on many levels, certainly for the people, and the opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical moment seemed very important to me,” he said. In Congressional testimony.
After returning to the United States, Walz continued his association with China, where he taught in schools in Nebraska and Minnesota. Through their company, Educational Travel Adventures, Walz and his wife, Gwen, have been taking groups of high school students to China for years, even spending their honeymoons there.
They married on June 4, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
“He wanted to have a date that he would always remember,” fellow teacher Gwen Walz told a local newspaper before their wedding.
Walz praised the people he met in China, even criticizing a government he saw as leaving them behind.
He told The Star-Herald of Nebraska in 1990, “There’s no limit to what they could achieve if they were led properly. They just gave and gave and gave. “Going there was one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
As a member of Congress, Walz has been outspoken on human rights issues in China, supporting the 2017 Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and Tiananmen Square resolutions, and pro-democracy activists such as the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Liu Xiaobo.
Walz visited Tibet in 1990 and again in 2015 as a member of a congressional delegation, and in 2016 had what he called a “life-changing lunch.” Dalai Lama, Tibetan spiritual leader in exile. Although China is facilitating modernization in Tibet, Walz told Congress that it is important to pressure the Chinese government “to ensure the preservation of traditional Tibetan culture.”
He also served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which focused on human rights.
“He is the most credible candidate in recent times, if not more, when it comes to human rights and China,” said Jeffrey Ngo, senior policy researcher and researcher at the Washington-based Hong Kong Council for Democracy. In 2016, he met Walz, An inscription in X says.
Nevertheless, Walz’s China experience drew immediate suspicion from Republicans who accused him of being “pro-China.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said, “Tim Walz owes it to the American people to explain his extraordinary 35-year relationship with Communist China.” An inscription in X says.
Waltz’s ties to China have also caught the attention of social media users in the country, where commentators have expressed hope as well as skepticism.
“It is rare for an American politician to openly say that two countries can live together without opposition,” read one comment on Weibo.
Others said American policymakers’ familiarity with China is not necessarily a good thing.
“The more American policymakers understand Chinese, the more they can clamp down on China because they may see the Chinese government’s actions as a threat to democracy,” he said.