Tim Walz’s “Old Friends” in the Chinese Communist Party

Since his selection as Vice Presidential candidate by Kamala Harris, scrutiny has been building over Gov. Tim Walz’s close relationship to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In The Spectator, Ian Williams discusses Walz’s status as an “old friend,” of the CCP. He writes:

The term “old friend of the Chinese people” has a sentimental, almost innocent ring, but the Chinese Communist Party regards it as a job description. It is a label used to describe foreigners looked on favorably by the CCP. But it also carries obligations — “old friends” are expected to be sympathetic and further the interests of the Party. “China will never forget their old friends,” said President Xi Jinping, when he met Henry Kissinger, the most famous holder of that title for his supposed pragmatism toward Beijing, shortly before his death.

Perhaps the most notorious “old friend” was Edgar Snow, the American journalist, who was given privileged access to Mao Zedong and his fellow revolutionaries in the 1930s, rewarding them with flattering portraits. In this respect it is not unrelated to the term “useful idiots,” which emerged during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and was used to describe those Westerners who allowed themselves to become dupes of communism.

The question of whether Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, can be regarded as an “old friend” is one of the larger unanswered questions of the US election, and much about his engagement with China remains unclear. There is no doubt that his experience in China is highly unusual among top US politicians, though his campaign now claims his number of visits was “closer to fifteen” and not the thirty he had originally claimed. During the October 1 vice presidential debate, he also said he “misspoke” when he said he was in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, en route to a teaching job on the mainland, even though his presence there at that traumatic time has for years been a key part of his China narrative.

Whatever the precise number of visits, it is the nature of those visits that so distinguishes him. If Kamala Harris is elected president, Walz will become the first vice president to have lived in China since George H.W. Bush, who served as the top US diplomat in Beijing in the 1970s. But Walz’s China was very different from that of Bush, who lived the relatively cloistered life of a diplomat; Walz was a teacher in provincial China before going on to organize multiple student study tours. And although vice presidents typically don’t have a lot of influence on American foreign policy, Harris had little record in international affairs before becoming vice president and has never been to China, suggesting that Waltz could have a larger say.

Tiananmen Tim, Wuhan Walz, Totalitarian Tim, the Great Walz of China are just some of the names thrown at Walz by his Republican critics. “Communist China is very happy with @GovTimWalz as Kamala’s VP pick,” Richard Grenell, who served as ambassador to Germany and acting national intelligence director in the Trump administration, said on X. The Harris-Walz campaign retorted that “Republicans are twisting basic facts.” James Singer, a campaign spokesperson, said Walz has long stood up to the CCP and “fought for human rights and democracy, and always put American jobs and manufacturing first.” That said, it has not been an issue the Democrats are keen to talk about, as if they cannot quite make up their minds whether in an era of bipartisan hawkishness toward Beijing, Walz’s China experience is an asset or a liability.

Read more here.