Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who debuted as Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign running mate on Tuesday, reportedly chose to get married on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and honeymooned in communist China.
Walz had a long history of educational work in China before entering American politics. Local media in Minnesota and his native Nebraska profiled his engagement with China several times prior to his political career and again when he ran for governor and won in 2018.
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Multiple social media posts began circulating on Tuesday, after news that he was chosen as a vice-presidential ticket for the Democrats began spreading, appearing to show a newspaper article detailing Walz’s career as an educator in China. The Washington Post corroborated the chatter in an article on Wednesday, confirming that Walz initially traveled to China in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and lived there for a year before making dozens of trips back as part of student exchange programs. The Post quoted Walz telling the Nebraska Star-Herald in 1990 that the Chinese treated him “exceptionally well.”
Walz again captured local media attention when he married his wife, Gwen, on June 4, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the massacre.
“They went to China on their honeymoon,” the Post added.
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appears with Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, on August 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The Tiananmen Square massacre occurred after days of protests by students in China in 1989 who, inspired by the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, were demanding an end to communism in their own country. They occupied the eponymous plaza in Beijing and erected the “goddess of democracy,” an iconic statue reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty. While the protests were peaceful, the Communist Party responded with outsized violence. The Chinese military stormed the square, rolling their tanks over the protesters and indiscriminately killing them.
“There were tanks rolling into crowds of people at high speed, crushing them into literally hamburger,” Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher, one of the first Western scholars allowed into China, told Breitbart News Tonight in 2019, the 30th anniversary of the killings. “The streets had to be scraped afterwards with bulldozers to get off the remains of the human beings who were killed by these tanks that ran over them. The butchery was horrible.”
Mosher recalled that Chinese troops also went into hospitals, killing those who survived on the streets and were receiving medical treatment.
The wounded were taken out — even those who were on life support who shouldn’t have been disconnected from their IVs — were all taken away in army trucks and never heard from again,” he explained.
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No complete tally of the lives lost in the incident exists. Diplomats estimated at the time that about 10,000 people were killed, according to documents unearthed in 2017.
“He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” the Washington Post reported Gwen Walz saying of her husband’s choice of wedding date at the time, apparently confirming that they chose the anniversary deliberately.
“On their first date (to the only movie theater in town, then Hardee’s), she refused a kiss. He said they’d be married someday. Their honeymoon was a trip to China with 60 kids in tow,” the Minnesota Star Tribune noted in 2018.
A year later, in a profile of the state’s new first lady, the Star Tribune reported, “They spent their honeymoon in China on a trip they organized for dozens of students. There was an odd number of students, so the couple didn’t even sleep in the same room.”
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Walz first went to China with a now-defunct Harvard University program known as WorldTeach. The Chinese government approved the trip, Walz’s congressional biography noted, indicating that the Communist Party did not find any objectionable content in the programs he was administering. He and his wife later began returning on a regular basis after establishing a tour company called Educational Travel Adventures, the South China Morning Post confirmed this week, citing the National Governors Association.
The governor has discussed being in China in 1989 in the aftermath of the slaughter, telling reporters in 2014 that he felt it was “more important than ever” to be in China after the killing.
“There was a lot of decisions whether many of my colleagues decided to go home and not to go on,” he told Voice of America. “I felt it was more important than ever to go, to make sure that story was told and to let the Chinese people know we were standing there, we were with them.”
将担任美国副总统哈里斯竞选搭档的蒂姆·沃尔兹(Tim Walz) 1989-1990年在中国广东教书，关注中国人权和民主的沃尔兹2014年接受美国之音访问时表示，天安门大屠杀发生后，他的许多美国同行为了安全决定离开中国，但他认为，当时比任何时候都应该在中国，“让中国人民知道我们与他们站在一起”。… pic.twitter.com/DSwB5CdH3Z
— 美国之音中文网 (@VOAChinese) August 6, 2024
One of Walz’s last known trips to China occurred in 2015 as part of a Congressional delegation with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), visiting Beijing and occupied Tibet. Returning from the visit, then-Rep. Walz (D-MN) claimed that he had a “healthy dialogue” with Communist Party officials and implied that they were open to discussing the ongoing colonization of Tibet and the exile of the Dalai Lama, the highest authority in Tibetan Buddhism, which the Party has violently repressed for decades.
“There’s no doubt, as anyone knows, the modernization of China over the last 25 years has been nothing short of spectacular, when it comes to infrastructure, and improvements in quality of life, access to clean water, access to health care services, and those things are undeniable,” Walz said at the time
Walz added that the communist officials “rightfully” raised “the Native American situation” in the United States when confronted about genocidal abuses against Tibetans.
The Chinese government has largely abstained from commentary about Walz’s position in the 2024 American presidential race at press time.
“The US presidential election is the domestic affair of the US. We have no comment on it,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Wednesday.
The English-language Global Times, typically quick to serve as a mouthpiece for the government on American domestic issues, has at press time not published any stories on Harris choosing Walz for her ticket. The state-run Xinhua News Agency posted a positive report, describing Walz as a “running mate who could appeal to myriad voting blocs” but omitting any mention of his storied background on China. Similarly, China Daily described Walz as “folksy and popular,” but offered little substance on his background and no mention of his relationship with China.
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