No, Tim Walz is not a Manchurian Candidate

If you enter the fevered corners of the info-verse, you might hear that Tim Walz is a Manchurian Candidate. The governor of Minnesota, just selected by presidential candidate Kamala Harris to serve as her running mate, does indeed have a longstanding interest in China.

After graduating from college in Nebraska (where, among other things, he took classes in East Asian Studies), Walz spent the 1989-90 school year teaching English and American history in Foshan, Guangdong Province as part of Harvard’s WorldTeach program. The Chinese “are such kind, generous, capable people,” the 26-year old told a reporter after returning home. “They just gave and gave and gave to me. Going there was one of the best things I have ever done.”

Walz and his wife Gwen later honeymooned in China. And they launched a company, Educational Travel Adventures, that led student trips to Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere in the PRC.

For some, this story might sound promising – a politician who actually knows something about the world’s second most powerful country. For others, though, it sounds suspicious. Maybe even downright scary.

Fox News proclaimed that Walz has a “bizarre infatuation” with China. The New York Post declared that the VP candidate “has fawned over Communist China.” Richard Grenell, director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, said on X that “no one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz.” Rogan O’Handley, a conservative influencer, called Harris’ Democratic Party running mate “a CCP puppet.”

What’s the evidence?

China hawks seem most exercised about a brief clip from a longer interview in 2016 with an agribusiness news outlet. Walz, then a member of Congress from a rural district in southern Minnesota, discusses legislation before the agriculture committee and then, more than six minutes into the conversation, his work on the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China. He tells the reporter that he doesn’t believe the U.S. must have an “adversarial” relationship with its then-leading trade partner. But he also goes on to challenge China’s increasingly aggressive behavior in the South China Sea — a statement excised from the clip shared by many on social media.

In fact, Walz has been openly critical of China’s human rights record, as well as its brutal authoritarianism. In 2009, while still in Congress, he co-sponsored a resolution blasting the PRC for arresting and detaining Liu Xiaobo, the pro-democracy activist who won a Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2016, he met the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled leader who is viewed as a dangerous “splittist” by Beijing. In 2017, he was one of two House members to push the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which called for sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for “undermining fundamental freedoms and autonomy” there. The bill did not pass until 2019, when Walz took up his position as governor of Minnesota. But he still won praise from a human rights activist in Hong Kong: “The fact that he supported it when very few people did and that his support was sustained – that’s different and that’s who he is.”

Some critics also claim that Walz, as governor, has allowed China to infiltrate institutions throughout the state. They point specifically to Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes, which teach Chinese language and culture to college students in the United States. But the University of Minnesota shut down its institute after Walz took office, and St. Cloud State University has suspended its institute, pending a review.

Although the governor has called for engagement with China, especially on climate change and trade, he has not been afraid to also question its foreign policy. Last year, in an interview with a Japanese newspaper, he said he was “disappointed with China’s recent performance – on the Ukraine issue, they are on Russia’s side.”

None of this supports the claim that Walz is a Manchurian candidate.

In China, few are predicting that Walz, as vice president, would have a significant impact on Washington-Beijing relations. Zha Daojiong, an international relations scholar at Peking University, told the Washington Post that, on U.S. policy toward China, there is “a ready and rich template among the two political parties in America” that would not change much with a single election.

The political kerfuffle over Harris’ selection of Walz actually tells us a lot more about ourselves than about the veep wannabe. In the U.S. today, there is a bipartisan streak of unhinged fear and hostility toward the PRC. It runs so deep and so wide that a substantial segment of American punditry loses its mind over the emergence of a politician who has pleasant memories of living in and visiting China in more youthful days, a politician who has dared to advocate for engagement with Beijing, even as he criticizes much of its behavior today. And the rest of us, generally, respond as if this is pretty normal.