Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz has exaggerated his experience traveling to China in the 1990s and early 2000s because he felt proud of it, legacy media claims.
Walz led a series of educational trips to China from 1993 through the early 2000s. Walz has, on multiple occasions, pegged the number of trips he took there at “about 30” or “dozens of times.” Walz’s vice presidential campaign recently acknowledged to Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) that the actual number of trips is “closer to 15,” however.
“Walz was so proud of his extensive experience abroad that he occasionally used to exaggerate it,” MPR reported.
Walz also once claimed to have been in Hong Kong in May 1989, the month before the Tiananmen Square massacre, and witnessed some of the student uprisings that ended in the Chinese government crackdown. Walz’s campaign could not find documentary evidence of his claims.
Contemporaneous newspaper accounts suggest that Walz was not in Hong Kong as he claimed. A May 16, 1989, photograph of Walz was taken at the National Guard Armory in Alliance, Nebraska, where Walz served as a social studies teacher from 1991 to 1996. A Nebraska newspaper from August 11, 1989, reported that Walz planned to “leave Sunday en route to China” after having “about given up participating [in WorldTeach] earlier this summer during the student revolts in parts of China.”
Walz’s vice presidential campaign could not offer documentation supporting either the claim of the number of times Walz visited China or being present in Hong Kong just ahead of Tiananmen Square. The campaign acknowledged that Walz’s claim to have visited China “about 30 times” is untrue. In defense, the campaign said that Walz exaggerated his experience in China because he was so proud of it, according to MPR.
Walz’s extensive experience traveling to China and his past excitement over it have been used by some Republicans to suggest that Walz may be overly sympathetic to the Chinese government, or potentially targeted by Chinese government influence operations.
“Throughout his career, Governor Walz has stood up to the [Chinese Communist Party], fought for human rights and democracy, and always put American jobs and manufacturing first,” the Harris-Walz campaign told MPR in a statement. “Republicans are twisting basic facts and desperately lying to distract from the Trump-Vance agenda: praising dictators, and sending American jobs to China.”
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Walz’s past pride in his time in China is absent from his current campaign website. Walz’s biography on the site touts his time in the National Guard, his experience as a teacher and coach, his family’s fertility struggles, and many other facets of his background. The biography makes no mention of China, however.
Walz’s false claim about his time in China follows similar erroneous claims about other aspects of his career and personal life. Walz has strongly suggested that he was deployed to Iraq during a time of war as a member of the National Guard, though he never was. Walz has also said he retired from the National Guard as a Command Sergeant Major – another false claim.
Earlier this year, Walz falsely stated that his family used IVF treatments to conceive in an attack line against former president Donald Trump’s campaign. Although the Walzs had fertility issues, they did not use IVF.
The Minnesota governor has also made false claims about his accolades as a teacher, claiming or suggesting that he had won multiple teaching awards that he had never been awarded. Walz has also been found to have made multiple false statements surrounding a 1995 incident in which he was arrested for drunk driving.
