Why would the Department of Homeland Security be so concerned about Tim Walz’s China ties that his name repeatedly comes up not only in internal communications, but in classified documents?
According to Congressman James Comer, Chairman of the U.S. House’s Committee on Oversight, whistleblowers have revealed “serious concerns among DHS personnel regarding a longstanding connection between the Chinese Communist Party and Minnesota Governor Timothy James Walz.”
I share those concerns. It could not be more obvious to me, a China-hand of long standing, that Walz has been “captured” by the CCP.
It’s all there in his record: The initial approach, the flattery, the paid trips, the joint venture, the academic appointment, the paid lectures.
The whole process is called “elite capture.” It’s designed to bring foreigners of influence into China’s powerful orbit and keep them there, in the same way a planet captures a moon.
The rewards increase as these “good friends of China” reach ever higher government positions.
Captured elites who are already in high positions, like Congressman Eric Swalwell, get very special treatment, with perhaps even a honeypot like Fang Fang thrown in for good measure.
No Fang Fang has emerged from Walz’ troubled dealings with Beijing, but it is clear that he was the beneficiary of a whole series of special favors from China, each of which seems to have been more lucrative than the last.
He was first on China’s payroll in 1989-90, where he taught English at Foshan No. 1 Middle School in the southern China city of the same name, not far from where I did my own groundbreaking research in China in 1980.
As in my case, the local Communist Party committee would have been charged with overseeing his activities, as well as determining what the CCP calls his “political stance.”
By his own account, they treated him like a visiting dignity, toasting him at banquets, showering him with gifts—all the while filling his head with fairy tales about the New China.
The blood was still drying on Tiananmen Square, but Walz bought into Chinese propaganda, big time.
For years afterwards 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.”
This was spoken at a time when he, on his repeat trips to China, was being feted at banquets by Communist Party officials who would consume more meat in a night than most Chinese would see in their rice bowls in a month
Other lies followed. 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.
China’s hundreds of millions of villagers were herded into the newly established people’s communes in 1958 on the promise they could eat their fill in the communal kitchens. Scarcely believing their good fortune, they gorged themselves for the next year.
Then the “free food” ran out and they were sent home to starve.
Over the next two years, the Chinese people experienced the worst famine in human history. Entire villages perished. Cannibalism was common. In all, forty-five million people starved to death.
So much for communism’s promise of free food.
So well-groomed was Walz by his Party handlers 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. They were forced to undergo abortions regardless of how far along they were. Doctors were under orders not to allow “illegal” babies who were born alive to survive. Lethal injections were given to infants who did.
I am an eyewitness to such human rights violations, which were occurring throughout the years that Walz was making his dozens of trips to China. For 36 years, China treated unborn children as “enemies of the state” and slaughtered them by the hundreds of millions.
There is no way that Walz, who speaks Chinese, could not have known about this tragedy, which affected every family in China.
Thus having proven his reliability, Walz was ready for the next step in the “capture” process: a joint business venture with China bringing over groups of young Americans to learn about the New China.
When does the Chinese Communist Party consider one of its elite targets well and truly “captured”? Probably when he allows himself to be used as a tool by the Party for indoctrinating American youth.
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 is tasked with setting up such front organizations to increase China’s influence abroad, but rather the United Front Department of the CCP. In this case, the goal was obviously to improve China’s image abroad—still suffering from the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre—by bringing over impressionable 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.
As it happens, I have received a number of similar offers over the years and turned them down.
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—or with 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 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 relationship with his “friend” in China now?
Thanks to the Post’s reporting on Hunter’s laptop, everyone knows what “the Big Guy’s” payoff was. That knowledge helped to keep Biden’s actions in check where China was concerned. Fear of appearing weak and compromised by China, for example, arguably kept him from lifting Trump’s tariffs on China.
We simply don’t know what sort of deals Walz has cut with China. But we do know that, despite that fact that China regards the U.S. as its “main enemy,” Walz continues to argue that China is not our adversary.
Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security would like to respond to Chairman Comer’s request and tell us, now that we are only a couple of weeks away from a presidential election that may put Walz a heartbeat away from the presidency.
But don’t hold your breath.
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An earlier version of this article was published in the New York Post on October 12, 2024.
