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By Forest Hunt, Caspar von Au and Curtis Gilbert, Minnesota Public Radio News

The warning from the U.S. State Department in June 1989 was stark. It told Americans to stay away from China, citing an “extremely volatile and potentially life-threatening” situation there following the Tiananmen Square massacre. Two months later, even though the department was still discouraging “non-essential” travel to the country, a 25-year-old teacher from Nebraska went there anyway.

“I’m somewhat apprehensive, but I’m also excited,” Gov. Tim Walz told a local newspaper before departing for a yearlong teaching appointment in the southern Chinese city of Foshan. “It will be an interesting experience, I’m sure.”

That experience sparked in Walz a lifelong fascination with Chinese culture — one he shared with hundreds of high school students on elaborately planned annual trips over the course of a decade and touted proudly when he first entered politics. Walz was so proud of his extensive experience abroad that he occasionally used to exaggerate it. His campaign now acknowledges that Walz’s past claims that he had been to China around 30 times were overstated, and the actual number of trips he’s taken from the United States to China is “closer to 15.”

But, now as Minnesota’s governor and the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president, Walz has chosen to emphasize his folksy image as a down-home Midwestern dad and state-championship football coach rather than his history as a peripatetic world traveler. His biography on the Harris-Walz campaign’s official website makes no mention of his extensive international experience.

As vice president, he would have a far bigger foreign policy role than he does now. Since Walz joined the national ticket, APM Reports has interviewed more than a dozen people and combed through business records, government documents, yearbooks and old news clippings in search of a better picture of his experience in China. The reporting — which includes exclusive video obtained by APM Reports of his time in China — paints a picture of a distinctive and often-overlooked part of Walz’s life.

Republicans have sought to portray that experience as nefarious.

House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has demanded the FBI help his committee investigate whether the Chinese Communist Party sought to groom a small-town social studies teacher as part of a shadowy program that “seeks to co-opt influential figures in elite political, cultural, and academic circles to influence the United States to the benefit of the communist regime and the detriment of Americans.”

That line of criticism pervades right-wing social media and could very well surface Tuesday, when Walz debates Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance.

“It’s a very misguided reaction,” said Peter Hessler, who has written four books on China and lived there for more than a decade.

“American policy has enormous impact on parts of the world that are developing, that have gone through poverty and isolation, and almost none of our leaders have spent much time in those places,” he said. “It’s never been seen as a positive of course, I think, because America is a fairly isolationist society in many ways. And people don’t understand why this is important, but it is important.”

Walz first went to China through WorldTeach, a small nonprofit based at Harvard University that sent American teachers to work in schools overseas.

During his year there, Walz has said he made frequent trips to Macau, which was still a Portuguese province and became a semi-autonomous part of China, similar to Hong Kong, in 1999. He also traveled thousands of miles to Tiananmen Square and Tibet, which was restricted at that time.

“I’m really quite impressed that he was able to pull that off in 1989 or 1990,” said Evan Dawley, a former China-based field director for WorldTeach. (WorldTeach is now defunct, and its archives at Harvard won’t be open to researchers and journalists until 2039, under a university policy that seals administrative records for at least 50 years.)

Sydney Rosen, who co-founded WorldTeach with economist Michael Kremer and served as its first director when Walz was sent to China, said volunteers often ignored her admonition to “stay away from the action … because these were 22-year-olds who thought it was exciting.”

It clearly was for Walz, and when he returned to Nebraska a year later to teach social studies in the 10,000-person town of Alliance, he was eager to share the experience with its residents. He gave presentations about his adventures to the local chapters of the Jaycees and the Rotary Club.

A cultural exchange

In 1993, Walz arranged what would be the first in a series of summer trips to China for his students.

“Mr. Walz made all the reservations by phone — in Chinese!” Alliance High School student Anne Hjersman wrote in a letter to the editor published in the local paper. Students and teachers who knew him recalled that he spoke at least proficient Mandarin, though he told a reporter in 1990 after he returned from Foshan (where the locals speak Cantonese) that he had “great difficulty” with Mandarin pronunciation. A Chinese New Year greeting he recorded as governor in 2021 includes brief messages in both Mandarin and Cantonese.

The trips would not have been possible without Walz’s connections in China. The Guangzhou University’s Physical Education Institute covered in-country costs for at least one of the early trips, a local newspaper reported in 1993. Students needed to come up with just $1,600 apiece to cover everything else on the first two-week trip. Students further defrayed costs by selling coupons for ice cream bars door to door — six bars for $2.

The goal of the program was “no different from the classroom,” explained Travis Hofmann, who went on the first three trips, and still has old VHS recordings from 1995. On the tape, Walz can be seen glistening with sweat aboard a sweltering train car, waving to people hiking the impossibly steep steps on the Great Wall and flashing a grin after he plucks a morsel of meat from a snail shell with a toothpick. “You just want to educate, learn, grow — understand people and differences and similarities,” Hoffman said.

The trips were extensively planned. The 1994 trip had about 50 participants and included six basketball games between the Americans and Chinese teams. The first game was in an aircraft hangar, but they also played in an arena nicer than any of the kids from rural Nebraska had ever seen, former Alliance basketball coach Rocky Almond recalled. The Americans, some of whom were over 6 feet tall and towered over their Chinese rivals, swept the games.

“I can’t fathom how they got all that put together,” said Almond, who attended as a chaperone. “I don’t know if we could do that at the scale now that we did back then.”

The hotels where the groups stayed provided elaborate meals each day, and Walz showed everyone how to use chopsticks. But the American students didn’t always enjoy Chinese cuisine. Participants recalled multiple times when students snuck away to eat McDonald’s. Eventually, hotel staff noticed some students weren’t eating, and the next day, the kitchen served American food instead.

“We all got in so much trouble,” said Sara Lohmeyer, one of the students on the trip. “That’s probably the only time I ever saw Tim upset.”

Walz told the group it was disrespectful and could not happen again. He also apologized to the hotel.

Walz’s love of the culture eventually rubbed off on Lohmeyer. When she had a severe asthma attack during the trip, Walz suggested Lohmeyer try acupuncture. “I, being a 16-year-old from Nebraska, was like, absolutely not,” she recalled. “Nobody’s sticking needles in me.”

Today, Lohmeyer runs an acupuncture practice in Denver.

Walz briefed the groups on topics to avoid during the trip, chief among them the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the square itself was a frequent stop for the school groups. During the 1997 trip, former Mankato West High School teacher Kim Hermer recalled locals gathering around them to have their pictures taken with a chaperone who had long blond hair.

“They were just so excited to see somebody who looked so different,” Hermer said. Then some guards showed up and demanded that the crowd disperse. “It was just very joyous and very fun and then it was over.”

None of the people APM Reports talked to felt that the Chinese government interfered with their travels, although Hermer did recall what she described as “minders” — “people who were just making sure that we saw what they wanted us to see …. We weren’t going in there trying to look for political secrets or anything like that. The focus was really just on the people.”

Walz’s China experience a point of pride in Congress

Walz proudly touted his experience in China in 2006 when he first ran for Congress.

“What we need in education, what we need in the military, and what we need when I’m fostering cultural exchanges with China, is real solutions,” he said during a debate with then-U.S. Rep. Gil Gutknecht, whom he would defeat handily that November.

His campaign website at the time noted his role as a visiting fellow of international relations at China’s Macau Polytechnic Institute. It also played up the small business he and his wife, Gwen, founded called Educational Travel Adventures, Inc., which it said “conducts annual educational trips to China for high school students,” a seeming reference to summer travel programs he ran in the schools where he worked.

Available documents show that the Walzes first incorporated the travel agency in Nebraska at the end of 1995 and ran ads in the local paper promoting a tour of Hong Kong, China, Nepal and Tibet and another one of Australia and New Zealand.

In 1998, Nebraska’s secretary of state dissolved the corporation for failing to pay a $26 annual tax, something the state says happens to thousands of companies every year. The Walzes eventually paid $235.56 in back taxes and interest and shut the company down voluntarily. They registered a new Minnesota company under the same name at the end of 2002, and shut it down permanently in 2008 during Walz’s first term in Congress.

As a congressman, Walz continued to build and promote his expertise on China. During his first term, records show Walz used a personal email address with the username “macau.”

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed him to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a body that monitors human rights issues and the rule of law there. He met with Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong and the Dalai Lama, and tweeted frequently in support of Chinese democracy advocates. Walz was also part of a congressional delegation to China and Tibet in 2015. In 2017, he and U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., cosponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The bill was eventually passed in 2019. By then, Walz had left Congress to become governor.

‘Closer to 15 times’

While in Congress, Walz sometimes exaggerated his already substantial experience in China. In 2016, he told an agricultural publication he had been there “about 30 times.” During at least two hearings of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China he claimed to have traveled to China “dozens of times.” Numerous media outlets have repeated those claims. But Walz’s annual trips with high school students between 1993 and the early 2000s would have accounted for around a dozen visits, give or take, and he made only one official trip there as a congressman.

APM Reports asked the campaign for documentation on the additional trips, and after weeks of searching, a spokesman finally acknowledged that Walz had traveled from the United States to China “closer to 15 times.”

Walz also once described being in Hong Kong in May 1989, during the student uprising that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre — an assertion that is belied by newspaper accounts at the time. “As the events were unfolding, several of us went in,” Walz said at a 2014 hearing commemorating the massacre’s 25th anniversary. “I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.”

A photograph published May 16, 1989, showed Walz working in the National Guard Armory in Alliance. And a story published in another Nebraska paper on August 11 that year said he would “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.” The August departure date is also consistent with WorldTeach’s 1989 promotional materials about the program.

The campaign was unable to produce documentation to back up Walz’s statement that he was there during the uprising.

Republicans attack Walz’s China connections 

Walz’s deep experience in China clearly sets him apart from most people who have run for vice president — or president for that matter. That would seem to be an asset if he becomes vice president, but the campaign is saying little about it.

His biography on the campaign website mentions his work as a teacher and football coach, including his team’s state championship victory 25 years ago, but nothing about his time in China.

Conservative commentators have tried to label him “Tiananmen Tim,” “The Great Walz of China” and even made the far-fetched claim that he is some sort of “Manchurian candidate,” a reference to the 1962 Cold War-era film about an American soldier brainwashed by Chinese agents to become an assassin.

“It’s very possible that China would be grooming an up-and-coming, rising star in the political process to try to have a foothold in our government,” U.S. Rep. Comer told Fox News in August. “This is how China operates. They think long term.”

Walz was hardly a “rising star” in politics when he was living in China and leading summer trips there. He was a small-town social studies teacher years before he ran for office.

The Harris-Walz campaign issued a brief written statement in response to questions for this story: “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,” it read in part. “Republicans are twisting basic facts and desperately lying to distract from the Trump-Vance agenda: praising dictators, and sending American jobs to China.”

Comer sent a letter to the FBI in August demanding information on Walz. In a follow-up letter dated Sept. 12, he said he had received no response.

“The FBI appears to deem these concerning facts unpersuasive to require its cooperation with a congressional investigation,” Comer wrote. His office did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Hessler, who wrote about his time in China between 1996 and 2007, says Comer’s line of attack reflects “the xenophobia of the moment, and the sinophobia of the moment.”

Kent Pekel, now the superintendent of Rochester Public Schools, lived in China during some of the same times Walz did. He said China and the United States didn’t view each other as adversaries in the 1990s.

“If you had told me then that there would be the level of animosity that exists [now] between the U.S. and China, I would never have believed it,” Pekel said. “It was a time of optimism — a time when the United States was very, very popular and widely admired.”

Additional reporting by MPR News senior reporter Hannah Yang and APM reporter Jennifer Lu.