(TibetanReview.net, Aug07’24) – The presumptive Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz has long-standing ties to China. However, he also has a solid record of being critical of China’s human rights record and of having met with the Dalai Lama as well.
US Vice-President and the Democratic Party candidate for President Kamala Harris’s newly announced running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has long-standing ties to China, having spent a year there teaching US history, literature, and English from 1989 to 1990. He was among the first group of American teachers to travel to China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, later saying that he felt it was important to “make sure that story was told” and that Chinese people knew that “we were standing there … with them,” noted the Foreign Policy in its weekly China Brief Aug 6.
The report continued that upon returning from China, Walz told a newspaper, “If they [the Chinese people] had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish. They are such kind, generous, capable people.” He and his wife set up a company to help US students make summer trips to China, traveling there themselves almost every year until 2003.
But this experience doesn’t mean that Walz is soft on Beijing. As a Representative in Congress from 2007 to 2019, he served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, sponsored numerous bills on human rights in China, and met with the Dalai Lama, the report said.
In a 2018 post on Twitter, Walz, now 60, described the encounter as a “life-changing lunch”, highlighting the discussion’s focus on “humility, patience, and compassion”, noted the scmp.com Aug 7.
In 2018, he was elected governor of Minnesota, then re-elected in 2022.
If Harris wins, it’s possible that Walz could be something of an ambassador to China. If Beijing is feeling friendly, it may lean on the angle of him being an “old friend,” it added.
“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” Bloomberg.com Aug 7 quoted Walz as saying in a video interview posted in 2016 that focused mainly on agriculture that is now being reposted on X. “I totally disagree, and I think we need to stand firm, on what they’re doing in the South China Sea. But there’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”
Walz’s stance toward China — and his past meeting with the Dalai Lama — may open him to criticism from Beijing. But a Chinese official, who asked not to be identified, said the choice of Walz is unlikely to impact US policy as American politicians are unified in their hardline views on China, the report noted.