ESSAY: TIM WALZ AND THE INSCRUTABLE CHINA CONNECTION
He’s been called Tiananmen Tim, Wuhan Walz, Totalitarian Tim, The Great Walz of China and much, much worse.
note to readers:
Currently taking a break from both Chinese politics and US politics! Traveling and trying to get some work done on a novel.
He’s been called Tiananmen Tim, Wuhan Walz, Totalitarian Tim, The Great Walz of China and much, much worse. Tim Walz, the vice-presidential pick of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has been the talk of the town for several days running, some of it edifying, some of it insubstantial, and much of it simply off the wall.
While Democrats hail the mild-mannered Minnesota governor for bringing balance and ballast to a Harris-Walz ticket, Republicans are raising questions about the man’s China connection.
Not long after graduating Chadron State College, Tim Walz joined a Harvard-organized program to teach English in China. Assigned to a classroom of 65 students in Foshan, Guangdong in 1989-1990, the future high school teacher was, by available accounts, a very ordinary wide-eyed stranger in a strange land.
He later told Americans back home how friendly and generous the ordinary citizens of China were despite the precipitous decline in US-China relations in the aftermath of the June 4, 1989 crackdown in Beijing.
During his year in south China, Walz says he would take the inexpensive public bus to visit Macau for the purpose of eating American fast food. He learned a smattering of Cantonese and a few terms in Mandarin, but even this modest accomplishment which was part of a thoroughly unremarkable experience as a young, first-time visitor is being used against him to portray him as an agent of Beijing’s will.
No sooner was Walz mentioned as the Democrat’s VP pick than Trump/Vance supporters unleashed an information-poor, innuendo-rich red scare, a take-no-prisoners approach to weaponize, what by all accounts sounds like a wholesome and edifying first time sojourn in a foreign country for a denizen of middle American into a dark, nefarious tale reeking of dirty intrigue, conspiracy and a communist plot.
To put it in blunt terms, Republicans have become purveyors of a xenophobia so extreme that merely visiting a country like China can be seen as constituting betrayal of the USA.
Republican partisans and operatives are taking a kernel of truth, about a young man’s Peace Corps-style experience in a populous land and spinning it into a complex conspiratorial mix of fantasy, bad jokes and outright lies, the punchline of which is to implicate Tim Walz as a “Manchurian Candidate”
The narrative, with its attendant echoes of Hollywood horror fantasy, suggests Walz has been brainwashed and programmed to serve his putative masters in Beijing.
The truth of the matter is of minor interest to the mudslingers, who cobble together all sorts of random, insupportable accusations in the hopes that some of it will stick and defile his image. The scramble to demonize Walz by weaponizing his China experience is being cobbled into a spurious narrative intended to sway credulous media consumers in November.
The latest US election cycle is indeed a sorry spectacle to witness, and while it must be noted that the Democratic Party has its share of skilled media manipulators, mudslingers, and also has a penchant for adhering to false and insubstantial narratives, the words coming from the Trump campaign, and the man himself, are at a whole new level of crazy-pants detachment from reality.
The Trump War Room, which boasts 2 million followers on X, has made posts on Walz that veer between dubious innuendo and outright insanity.
Even seemingly neutral statements are presented in such a way as to implicate Walz in a web of right-wing conspiratorial thinking.
-After his first trip to China, Walz “spread Chinese propaganda”
No explanation or evidence given. For true Trump believers an accusation will suffice.
-For his honeymoon Walz went back to China, and took his high school students with him
It’s hard work shepherding dozens of American teenagers on an exchange program to a foreign country, and it says something rather admirable about the man’s work ethic that he was willing to combine his honeymoon with educational outreach, but this is made to sound ominous in the context of the Trump report.
-Walz spent so much time in China that he learned the language!
Have the xenophobic nationalists stooped so low as to believe that learning a foreign language is bad? Is a new age of Know-nothingism upon us? Has Tim Walz become irreversibly tainted by his very modest command of Chinese?
The anti-China card being played by Trump partisans has extensive media reach. It’s easy to dismiss the deranged podcasts of the Trump supporter known as “MyPillow guy” Mike Lindell when he accuses Walz of making “horrible decisions with the China virus when that came in. Just a disgusting individual!”
But what about CNN?
CNN points out, with a hint of self-reflective pride, that its report on Walz was blacked out in China.
That’s on Beijing. But how about CNN. Did they produce a well-researched report?
In the news feature “Republicans step up Walz attacks, seize on trips to China” why does CCN show an unrelated picture of Liu Xiaobo at Tiananmen Square in 1989 with a chyron reading “Tim Walz says he was “treated like a king?”
What’s the connection, if any?
Is “Tiananmen Tim” being tainted merely for his physical presence in China in 1989?
In a country as big as China, is it not possible that one should encounter gracious citizens, even in the aftermath of a far-away traumatic event?
CNN then goes on to quote two Chinese netizens on Weibo, trading in the kind of innuendo that Fox News is so adept at:
-“1989? Great timing!
-“The years he was in China make him suspicious”
It’s not enough to criticize China, as Tim Walz, an outspoken proponent of human rights has done on numerous occasions. The US far right, whipping up a wave of knee-jerk nationalist outrage in support of Trump and Vance wants to excoriate China and anyone who lives there and anyone has ever had anything to do with the country.
The American media has lost its moral compass.
The way Tim Walz is being painted “red” is as unfair as it is untrue, but the broad brush strokes are informative in as much as they reveal the hidden prejudices of his detractors.
