Tim Walz lectured on international relations at a state-run university in China and made dozens of trips to the Communist country — many of them now under scrutiny a week after he was chosen as the Democratic vice presidential candidate.
US Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana is demanding the Pentagon investigate whether the Minnesota governor complied with foreign travel reporting requirements “for his security clearance during his many trips,” some of which took place while he was a senior ranking member of his state’s Army National Guard.
In a letter to the Pentagon in August, Republican Banks called the situation “an obvious security risk.”
Walz was a visiting fellow at the CCP-sanctioned Macau Polytechnic University until at least 2007, according to public filings and press reports. The school was established in 1981 and subscribes to the vision of China’s Belt and Road Initiative — a massive infrastructure program that is the cornerstone of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s aggressive pursuit of influence overseas.
“We do this in alignment with China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” reads a statement from Marcus Im Sio Kei, the rector of the Macau Polytechnic University, on the school’s website. “We are committed to cultivate talented individuals to serve the country and Macau.”
Macau, a former Portuguese colony, was taken over by China in December 1999.
In addition to teaching in Macau, Walz has taken more than 30 trips to China, beginning in the spring of 1989 during the massacre of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, which was universally condemned by the West.
During that first trip, Walz spent a year teaching under the auspices of World Teach, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that sends volunteers to teach in developing countries. The group, which was started by former Harvard University students, has partnered with Changsha Yuanjing Education Consulting Limited, a company affiliated with China’s Ministry of Public Security, according to public records.
“As a young man I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong province and was in Hong Kong in May 1989,” he told a Congressional panel on China in 2014. Walz taught American culture and English as a second language to 1,000 high school and middle-school students each week, he said.
“As the events were unfolding, several of us went in,” he said. “I still remember the train station in Hong Kong. There was a large number of people — especially Europeans, I think — very angry that we would still go after what had happened.”
For China expert Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, traveling to China during the Tiananmen crackdown “was a mistake.”
“Any individual traveling dozens of times to an adversary nation in a personal capacity while having access to classified information poses an obvious security risk,” Banks wrote in the Aug. 12 letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “An individual with a clearance should have had the good judgement not to engage in such travel in the first place, and any superiors or security officers for that individual are obliged to prevent such risky behavior.”
US service members are ordered to report on such trips, but “especially” so when dealing with an adversarial country, and are “required to complete debriefing questionnaires” and report any suspicious behavior they encountered, said Banks
It’s not clear if Walz reported his trips to China to his superiors in the National Guard. Requests for comment were not returned Wednesday.
“The obvious question is did Walz have a [security] clearance and at what level?” said Scissors.
While he noted that attitudes around China changed in the mid 1990s during a period of engagement with the Communist country, Scissors said that traveling there as an active duty US service member could be problematic.
Walz, a former high-school teacher, organized annual trips for US students to China.
In 1995, he and his wife registered a for-profit company in Nebraska to take high-school students on trips to the Communist country. Gwen Walz, a former teacher and school administrator, is listed as the president of Educational Travel Adventures, while Walz is listed as the secretary and treasurer of the company that was incorporated using their home address in Mankato, Minn., according to public documents.
They married a year earlier on June 4, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the end of the deadly Tiananmen protests. “He wanted a date he’ll always remember,” Gwen told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald in 1994. The two spent their honeymoon there, according to the paper.
“The toughest part was learning to tell them apart and memorizing their names, [Walz] said,” the Star-Herald reported at the time, adding, “in China students thought all Americans looked alike.”
Later, Walz advocated for human rights in the country, co-sponsoring the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2017 that called for the release of Nobel Peace Prize winner and activist Liu Xiaobo, before the activist’s death in July of that year.
https://nypost.com/2024/08/14/us-news/walzs-china-ties-under-scrutiny
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