Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s meteoric rise and his aptitude for putting down Republicans is driving the GOP crazy and has it scrambling desperately to find comebacks. By far the funniest attempt to take down Walz has come from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
In an interview this week with Fox Business, Johnson warned that Walz is a “radical leftist” and made the case by pointing out what he called Walz’s “strange” relationship with China. “He got married on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. He’s gone to China. He’s taught in China. He’s got deep connections to China,” Johnson said in the interview.
Johnson, a China hawk like most members of his party, ought to be encouraged by Walz’s symbolic gesture, not suspicious of it.
I had to listen to the interview twice to make sure I wasn’t mishearing it, because I couldn’t believe Johnson had pointed to Walz’s remembrance of the Tiananmen Square massacre as evidence that he could be some kind of Manchurian candidate. Johnson seems unaware that he scored an own goal.
Johnson is right about the basic fact: Walz did choose the date of the incident for his marriage. But the 1989 incident, during which Chinese troops opened fire on and killed hundreds — possibly thousands — of peaceful protesters in Beijing who were calling for political reforms, is an event that the Chinese Communist Party loathes anybody mentioning. The government has aggressively sought to suppress information about the protests and the Communist Party’s crackdown in China; even so, the event remains one of the most iconic reference points for human rights criticism of Beijing. Walz has said the date “will always have a lot of bitter memories for the people”; his choice to make it the date of his wedding anniversary is clearly an homage to the victims. Walz’s act of remembrance is an act of rebellion against the Chinese government’s agenda to conceal its murderous repression.
In other words, Johnson, a China hawk like most members of his party, ought to be encouraged by Walz’s symbolic gesture, not suspicious of it. Either he’s illiterate about Chinese history or he’s just throwing anything at the wall to see what’ll stick. Maybe it’s both. The GOP has gone all in trying to peddle conspiracy theories that Walz’s many trips to China — first to teach English, and then as a teacher escorting American students on cultural exchange visits — have compromised him somehow. House Republicans are investigating Walz for ties to China, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has hysterically accused Walz of having been covertly co-opted by China, posting on X that Walz is an example of how “Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders.”
But, again, the GOP has gotten everything exactly upside down. Walz’s background and record on China are not liabilities but strengths. There’s nothing known about Walz’s trips there that suggest anything unseemly. His comments on the record — many of which were documented in local papers long before he expressed any political ambitions — show that he has consistently expressed affection for the Chinese people and criticism of their government. “If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what [Chinese people] could accomplish,” he told the Alliance Star-Herald in Nebraska in 1990. Walz also speaks Mandarin. This kind of background is not a warning sign. It’s reflective of the kind of cosmopolitan, critically engaged sensibility one wants in a politician who can influence international affairs.
As my colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim has pointed out, Walz’s congressional record suggests he’s far from a pushover when it comes to pointing out China’s problems:
As a member of Congress, he met with Tibetan leaders and Chinese dissidents, and he served on a congressional commission that tracks human rights abuses in China. In 2017, he co-sponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act; Jeffrey Ngo, a senior policy and research fellow at the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, credited its passage years later to Walz’s early support.
Walz also opposes China’s expansion in the South China Sea but has expressed optimism about “areas of cooperation that we can work on,” and believes the U.S.-Chinese relationship doesn't necessarily need "to be an adversarial relationship.”
As Paul Musgrave, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, puts it, Walz’s record is “that of a measured critic of the Chinese Communist Party—prone neither to exaggeration nor accommodation.” In Musgrave's assessment, Walz is a moderate who defies the categories of "hawk" and "dove" on China, and approaches the issue as "a student and a teacher."
Republicans, frantic to find a vulnerability in Walz’s armor as an affable happy warrior from the Midwest, have decided that his China affiliations are a path to taking him down. But the more one learns about those affiliations, the more one realizes that it’s a good thing that someone with his background could soon become the vice president.