Tim Walz Wants the U.S. and China on ‘the Same Sheet of Music’

America’s governors generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to China-related policy questions: those who champion legislation and executive action crafted to respond to Beijing’s malign activities in the U.S. and those who seek to deepen their states’ engagement with Beijing.

To the extent that he addressed China-related matters during his five years in the Minnesota governor’s mansion, Tim Walz has generally fit the latter model more than he fit the former, engaging Chinese diplomats and playing up his state’s historical contacts with “senior Chinese leaders.”

What’s also apparent is that Kamala Harris’s running mate has a pretty consistent outlook on China that blends robust human-rights advocacy with a willingness to emphasize the importance of “cooperation” with Beijing, even as that has fallen out of fashion in Washington recently.

This perspective comes from his time living in the country, in addition to his work as a member of the House of Representatives.

Walz has said that the year he spent in China on an educational exchange — from 1989 through 1990 — revealed to him the ingenuity and generosity of the country’s people and that watching the Tiananmen movement’s Goddess of Democracy statue go up was a “magical moment.”

During his time in Congress from 2007 to 2019, he joined numerous initiatives criticizing Beijing’s human-rights abuses and met several of the Chinese Communist Party’s top detractors, including the Dalai Lama, Joshua Wong, and other human-rights advocates.

These experiences have not made him a hawk, though.

“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” he said in a 2016 interview in his Capitol Hill office with Agri-Pulse — an agriculture-focused publication.

“I totally disagree [with] and think we need to stand firm on what they’re doing in the South China Sea, but I think there’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on,” he said.

He also spoke about a trip that he took to China earlier in the year, which included a meeting with China’s agricultural minister.

He added that his work on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a human-rights monitoring body, has “opened channels of collaboration.”

“When we’re on the same sheet of music, two of the world’s great superpowers, there’s many collaborative things that we can do.”

Walz’s record as governor indicate that his perspective seems not to have changed much since he left Congress.

Every May since 2019, Walz issued a certificate to mark Falun Dafa Day, a celebration of adherents to the Falun Gong faith — which Beijing regards as a “poison” and has sought to squelch in a brutal crackdown that has seen the use of organ-harvesting and harassment campaigns on U.S. soil.

Other actions he has taken indicate that he still believes that Beijing is capable of engaging in good-faith cooperation.

Walz still receives representatives of the Chinese regime. He hosted Zhao Jian, China’s consul general in Chicago, at the Minnesota state capitol in March, according to the consulate general’s website.

That was four months after President Biden met General Secretary Xi in San Francisco, their first in-person meeting since the spy-balloon incident. The Biden–Xi meeting marked a dramatic turnaround in the bilateral relationship, as both sides resumed diplomatic dialogue that China had dropped in a bid to get the Biden administration to see things its way.

Zhao used the meeting to talk up China’s willingness to work with the U.S. to implement the outcomes from San Francisco.

According to the consulate, Walz said he was pleased by what occurred in San Francisco and said that the people of his state hope that cooperation and exchanges with the Chinese people will develop further.

Three years before his meeting with Zhao, Walz had addressed a congratulatory letter to a Chinese-language school in Edina, Minn., recognizing its tenth Chinese New Year celebration. In the February 2021 letter, Walz wrote that his state has a “longstanding relationship with the people of China.”

The note, addressed to the school in February 2021, came two weeks after the State Department had declared that the Chinese Communist Party is carrying out genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

“The state has promoted Minnesota’s connections with China and has hosted numerous senior Chinese officials for decades,” he wrote, adding that “these ties are rapidly expanding through the growth of education, trade, and investment opportunities between our two peoples.”