Tim Walz's 30-Year Relationship With China

With the United States and China engaged in a heated trade war, the US-China Peoples Friendship Association (USCPFA) scheduled its national convention in Minneapolis.

Minnesota’s soybean trade made it China’s best leverage against President Trump’s tariffs and the regime was fortunate to have one of its own in the governor’s residency.

Gov. Tim Walz was the highest ranking elected official with the broadest ties to China. And so it surprised no one when the US-China Peoples Friendship Association listed him as one of its speakers at the convention alongside notable Communist influence operation figures.

Earlier that year, Walz had gone on a foreign trip to Asia along with his Lt. Gov: leaving no one in charge of Minnesota. While the trip was ostensibly undertaken to find alternative trading partners to China, it was actually a propaganda move to stir up opposition to Trump’s trade war.

In September 2019, Gov. Walz returned claiming that the state’s farmers ‘remain in desperate need of a U.S. trade deal with China.’

“There’s just no substitute for 1.6 billion consumers who are hungry to get our China trade negotiations normalized,” he claimed.

And next month in October, it was time for the USCPFA convention. While the USCPFA represents itself as an alliance of ordinary citizens seeking better relations, it had started out as a Communist front group. Revolution magazine wrote that “Communists, members of the Revolutionary Union (and later the Revolutionary Communist Party) were instrumental in the formation of the earliest local Friendship Associations in 1971 and played a significant role in the creation of the national association and in the building of locals across the country.”

In his book ‘Red Destinies’, historian Colin B. Burke wrote that the USCPFA “like the Party’s front organizations of the 1930s and 1940s it was advertised as a liberal, non-political organization supporting peace and cultural understanding. But in 1971, the founders had other missions: Advance the interests of Communist China and world communism.”

When Gov. Tim Walz showed up at the USCPFA convention, the most obvious sign of the organization’s close ties to China’s influence operation came from Walz’s fellow speaker. As Natalie Winters of Steven Bannon’s War Room first reported, Walz’s fellow speaker at the convention was Li Xiaolin, the president of the “Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), which leads a billion-dollar Chinese influence operation flagged by the U.S. State Department for ‘directly and malignly influencing” American politicians.’”

Another politician might have pleaded ignorance, but Gov. Tim Walz had been promoted as “one of a select few members of the Legislative Branch with extensive, on-the-ground experience in the Middle Kingdom.” He had probably spent more time in China than any major American elected official.

Walz’s Chinese career began after graduating college when he took a position teaching in China where the future congressman, governor and vice presidential nominee claimed that “no matter how long I live, I will never be treated that well again.”

Together with his wife created a company that brought American students to China and which appeared to be in business for the next two decades.

Walz’s student trips to China were subsidized by the Chinese government. According to a newspaper article at the time, Walz had the idea while working in the Communist country and a “friend helped contact the authorities and funding came through from the government.” 

The "friend" worked in China's Foreign Affairs Department which is routinely used to recruit foreigners.

The students on Walz’s trip enjoyed a “special status” that “let them go places other people can’t.” The students would then be taken to a university to teach them about the Chinese government. Walz however urged students however to “downplay their America-ness.”

"Walz has always been fascinated by Communist China," a news story claimed. "He remembers from his childhood pictures of Mao Tse-Tung hung in public places and carried in parades."

He "jumped" to come to China "fearing the door to the People's Republic might close after the protests of 1988." These protests climaxed with the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

A story about Gwen Walz, the governor’s politically extremist wife, described them traveling to the Communist dictatorship “nearly every summer through 2003.”

After being trained to run for political office with the radical leftist Wellstone Action group (now known as RePower), Walzno longer ran trips, but did not turn his back on his interest in China.

Once in Congress, Rep. Walz continued going back to China and meeting with Chinese figures.

In 2013, he became the Vice Ranking and then Ranking Member on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. He would remain on the Commission until he ran for governor. While Walz occasionally maintained credibility by expressing concern about human rights, he also remained comfortably enmeshed with promoting China’s agenda.

In 2014, Walz greeted a Chinese delegation and claimed that, ““When we work together and when we collaborate together, there’s nothing we can’t solve.” Six years away from the Wuhan Virus, Walz claimed that Chinese medical help would allow them to cure cancer.

In 2015, Walz visited China and praised its infrastructure and progress on global warming.

“I’ve lived in China, and as I’ve said, I’ve been there about 30 times,” he claimed in 2016. “I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree.”

As governor, Walz continued pandering to China. In a letter, he claimed that “the state has promoted Minnesota’s connections with China and hosted numerous senior Chinese leaders for decades.”

Appearing at the convention of a Communist front group created to advance China’s interests with a leading figure promoting those interests was not an aberration, but a continuation of Walz’s lifelong advocacy for Communist China.

As a potential vice president or president during an era of global confrontations with the People’s Republic of China, Tim Walz’s long history of China ties raise troubling questions that have yet to be addressed or answered. As a private citizen, Walz benefited from China and as a congressman and a governor, he aided Communist China’s interests in the United States.

The United States lived through four years of questions about Biden’s family connections to China. Kamala’s decision to pick Walz as her VP means those questions are not going away.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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