Before this week, the governor of Minnesota was not a major national political player in the United States. While many Americans are still catching up on his background, some of his experiences are getting a lot of publicity in China.
Early in Tim Walz’s career, he spent more than a year teaching English and U.S. history in Guangdong Province in Southern China.
This began in 1989 — the year of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing — and the government crackdown that followed.
Reuters reported that he’s visited China more than 30 times, including for his honeymoon.
In later years, he and his wife started a company that organized trips to China for U.S. students, wrapping up that business more than 20 years ago.
Walz has been critical of China's records both on human rights and on trade. He has met with such high-profile China critics as the Dalai Lama and Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong.
The South China Morning Post quoted a handful of mainland China policy experts who don’t expect any major impact on the approach or execution of policy toward China based on Walz’s experiences.
State-controlled Phoenix TV wrote that Walz might be able “to promote cultural and people-to-people exchanges.”
China’s government remains silent on all of this so far.
On Wednesday, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said all matters relating to the U.S. presidential election are “internal affairs of the United States.”
