Freedom

Opinion by Steven W. Mosher

Why would the Department of Homeland Security be so concerned about Tim Walz’s China ties that his name repeatedly comes up in internal communications and classified documents? 

According to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, whistleblowers have revealed “serious concerns among DHS personnel regarding a longstanding connection between the Chinese Communist Party and Minnesota Governor Timothy James Walz.”  

Those concerns could not be more obvious to me, a China hand of long-standing: Tim Walz has long had a special relationship with the CCP.

It’s all there in his record: The initial approach, the flattery, the joint venture, the academic appointment, the paid trips and lectures. The whole process is called “elite capture.” 

And it’s designed to bring foreigners of influence into China’s powerful orbit.  

Walz’s troubling dealings with Beijing began in 1989-1990, where he taught in a school not far from where I did my own research in China. By his own account, local Party officials treated him like a visiting dignitary, toasting him at banquets, showering him with gifts — all the while filling his head with fairy tales about the New China. 

For years afterward, Walz would tell his students that “communism” in China meant that “everyone is the same and everyone shares. The doctor and the construction worker make the same.”

China’s villagers would beg to differ. They complained to me that officials consumed more meat at a single banquet than they saw in their rice bowls in a month.

Parroting official propaganda, Walz assured his students that “The Chinese government . . . provide[s] housing and 30 pounds of rice per month. The [Chinese] get [free] food and housing.”

Now you understand why he and Kamala support rationing, since it worked so well in China. 

Except it didn’t.

So well-groomed was Walz by his Party associates that he even tried to justify the one-child policy on the grounds that “the Chinese population was so large,” and falsely claimed that the only penalty for having a second child was that “the family pays a tax.”

The women of China didn’t just pay a tax, however, they paid with their blood. I am an eyewitness to forced abortions carried out on pregnant Chinese women; this is, as J.D. Vance would say, barbaric.

There is no way that Walz, who speaks Chinese, could not have known about these and other tragedies, which affected every family in China.

Having proven his reliability, Walz was ready for the next step in the “elite capture” game:  a joint business venture with Beijing to bring over groups of young Americans to learn about the New China. 

As Walz tells it, a “friend” who was “an official in China’s foreign ministry” suggested the idea of setting up a travel agency, and offered to help fund it.

But it is not China’s foreign ministry that set up front organizations to increase China’s influence abroad, but rather the United Front Department of the CCP. 

In this case, the goal was to improve China’s image abroad — still suffering from the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre — by bringing over young Americans on guided propaganda tours.

Walz was a willing partner in this effort, which was called Educational Travel Adventures Inc., and his business partner was none other than the Chinese Communist Party itself. 

Walz closed down his travel business in 2004, but by then he was a visiting fellow at the Macau Polytechnic University in China. We don’t know how—and how much — he was compensated for his services, but it’s a question worth asking.

He maintained this public tie to this Chinese education institute until at least 2007, when he was elected to Congress. In recent years, as governor, he’s had close ties with a local Minneapolis organization tied to Beijing. And Walz himself has said that he is still “pretty friendly with China.”

One wonders what precisely is Tim Walz’s relationship with his “friend” in China now?  

Thanks to the Post’s reporting on Hunter’s laptop, everyone knows what “the Big Guy’s” payoffs were. The public exposure of Biden’s China grift made him politically vulnerable on China policy, so he had to tread carefully in doing return favors for China. 

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Half a decade on, we simply don’t know what sort of dealings Walz had (or still has) with China. But we do know that, despite the fact that China regards the US as its “main enemy,” Walz continues to argue that China is not our “adversary.”

“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree,” Walz said in an interview with Agri-Pulse in 2016.