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WALZ: Ties to Communist China
After graduating from Chadron State College in Nebraska, Walz, through Harvard University’s WorldTeach initiative, worked for a year in a “teacher exchange” program wherein he taught American history and English to teenage students in China. The program was paid for by the Chinese government, and was made possible by a friend of Walz in China’s Foreign Affairs Department. Notably, Walz began this endeavor just months after the Communist Chinese government had slaughtered thousands of pro-democracy protesters in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Upon returning to the U.S. and taking a job as a social studies teacher at a Nebraska high school, Walz told the Nebraska National Guard’s newspaper: “Going there [to China] was one of the best things I’ve ever done.” Asserting that Chinese officials had treated him “like a king” and showered him with “more gifts than I could bring home,” he would later reflect: “No matter how long I live, I will never be treated that well again.”
During his tenure as a teacher in Nebraska, Walz told his students in a November 1991 lesson about China’s Communist system: “It [Communism] means that everyone is the same and everyone shares. The doctor and the construction worker make the same. The Chinese government and the place they work for provide housing and 14 kg or about 30 pounds of rice per month. They get food and housing.”
In Nebraska as well, Walz met and fell in love with a fellow instructor named Gwen Whipple. The couple eventually married in 1994 and spent their honeymoon in China. Their wedding day was the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — a date that, by Gwen’s telling, was chosen by Tim Walz because he “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.”
Walz and his wife subsequently went on to make numerous trips to China as a couple, nearly every summer through 2003.
During his 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Walz went back to China a number of times to meet with influential political figures there.
Also during his time in Congress, Walz worked to earmark some $7 million for the Minnesota-based Hormel Institute, a publicly-funded laboratory that collaborated on projects with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 had its genesis. Walz also praised the work of the Wuhan Institute.
In 2015, Rep. Walz visited China and praised its infrastructure as well as the progress the nation was making in its fight against the alleged crisis of climate change.
In 2015 as well, Walz was part of a congressional delegation led by Nancy Pelosi that traveled to China, Tibet, and Hong Kong.
In 2016, Rep. Walz stated: “I’ve lived in China, and as I’ve said, I’ve been there about 30 times. I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree.”
In January 2019, a Chinese Communist Party diplomat and other CCP government officials attended Walz’s inauguration as governor of Minnesota. A translation from a Chinese government source said of that event: “Acting Consul General Liu Jun congratulated Governor Walz and expressed his expectation to strengthen cooperation with the new Minnesota government to jointly promote the friendly and cooperative relations between Minnesota and China.”
In a letter he wrote as governor of Minnesota, Walz boasted that his state “has promoted Minnesota’s connections with China and hosted numerous senior Chinese leaders for decades.”
In September 2019, Walz, having just returned from a trip to Asia, voiced his displeasure over President Trump’s ongoing trade war with China, where: (a) Trump had set tariffs and other trade barriers on China in an effort to force the latter to end its unfair trade practices, and (b) the Chinese government then took retaliatory measures. Asserting that Minnesota’s farmers desperately needed the Trump administration to forge a trade deal with China, Walz said: “There’s just no substitute for 1.6 billion consumers who are hungry to get our China trade negotiations normalized. There is not enough market in the rest of the world to absorb our capacity.”
Soon thereafter, the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association (USCPFA) – which was founded as a Communist front organization led by members of the Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party — invited Gov.Walz to speak at its October 2019 national convention in Minneapolis alongside a number of highly influential Communist figures. In his 2023 publication, Red Destinies, historian Colin B. Burke writes that although the USCPFA’s founders in 1971 sought to “advance the interests of Communist China and world communism.”
When Walz made his appearance at the aforementioned USCPFA convention in 2019, one of his fellow speakers was Li Xiaolin, president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC). InfluenceWatch.org describes CPAFFC as an organization that: (a) is funded by the Chinese Communist Party”; (b) is used, according to the U.S. government, to “directly and malignly influence state and local leaders” to promote China’s global agenda; and (c) is guided by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era.”
During an August 12, 2024 appearance on the Breitbart News Daily podcast, bestselling author Peter Schweizer stated that Walz remains connected to the Chinese government through “secret police stations that the Chinese have here in the United States,” stations which are unofficial but “so-called united front groups that exist in the West.” These stations, Schweizer explained, “cooperate with Chinese intelligence” in order to “intimidate Chinese [expatriates] that are living in the United States that don’t like the CCP or [are] critical of the CCP.”
Schweizer cited one alleged CCP police station that is “tied to a group called Minnesota Global, which is a Tim Walz organization.” “Now Tim Walz in 2020 and since 2020 has talked ad nauseam about the abuse by the police, the Twin Cities police, the local Minneapolis Police, about their terrible behavior with regards to how they arrest people,” added Schweizer. “I have not found one criticism that Tim Walz has had of this Chinese secret police station that’s operating in the Twin Cities. So again, you have to wonder, why is there this disconnect? Why are you so critical and brutal on your own country, but you won’t do a scintilla of the same thing as it regards to China?
On August 25, 2024, Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo asked Schweizer: “Do you believe that the Communist Party has been grooming Tim Walz?” Schweizer replied, “Oh, I think there’s no question about it, Maria. It goes back to the exchange program that he ran and brought hundreds of students from the United States to China…. [B]y the students’ accounting, Tim Walz [was] saying things like, well, in China, nobody is poor because everybody shares in China as if sort of a compulsive arm of the CCP is voluntary. I mean, sharing is voluntary. It’s a ridiculous statement to make. There are other comments he made. He told students going to China to downplay their American-ness. There’s an account from one student, I haven’t been able to independently verify, saying that he brought back lots of copies of Mao’s Little Red Book when he was in China.”
TRUMP: His Dealings with China
President Trump imposed various tariffs and sanctions against China in retribution for transgressions such as China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property, its purchase of fighter jets and anti-aircraft missiles from Russia, and its efforts to help North Korea evade American economic sanctions. The Trump tariffs and sanctions had an enormous impact on the Chinese economy. Reuters reported that by August 2019, “growth in industrial production [in China was] at its weakest in seventeen-and-a-half years.”
In October 2020, the Washington Times wrote the following about President Trump’s highly effective dealings with China:
“Donald Trump is the only president to meaningfully confront China’s abusive trade policies…. The groundbreaking U.S.-China Phase One Economic and Trade Agreement he signed in January stops forced technology transfer, protects our intellectual property, promotes U.S. financial services, removes barriers to trade, and creates long-term market access for American exports in manufacturing, agriculture and more. For the first time, these commitments from China are in writing and are fully enforceable.
“Mr. Trump is also maintaining pressure on China through tariffs on $370 billion in exports to the United States, including nearly all Chinese-made high-tech products….
“China is finally taking action to address numerous and long-standing intellectual property concerns….
“Of the 57 regulatory and structural changes that China committed to make in agriculture, China has already completed 50. This has led to significant new market access for U.S. poultry, beef, dairy, grains, seafood and more….
“[E]xports of U.S. manufacturing products to China have increased, and China has removed discriminatory barriers to open up its financial services sector to U.S.-owned enterprises, including life, pension and health insurance, securities, fund management and futures services. This allows U.S. companies to compete on a more level playing field in China.”