The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is demanding answers about any ties Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has to the Communist Party of China. Walz has said he’s proud of his ties to China dating to 1989.
The committee has spent several years investigating CCP political warfare operations involving influencing “important figures in elite political circles to the benefit of the communist People’s Republic of China.”
As part of its ongoing investigation, committee chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Kentucky, asked FBI Director Christopher Wray “to provide all information, documents, and communications in the FBI’s possession related to CCP connected entities and officials” with whom Walz has engaged and partnered. The FBI replied that its Foreign Influence Task Force “investigates this kind of CCP activity.”
The FBI remains uncooperative and its “silence regarding Mr. Walz’s documented relations with CCP affiliates is inexcusable,” Comer said.
Cited concerns include Walz’s recent meeting with CCP Consul General Zhao Jian to discuss “China-U.S. relations and sub-national cooperation;” being a Macau Polytechnic University fellow while in Congress, which aligns with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, “a political warfare program developed by President Xi Jinping to exert China’s influence worldwide;” and secured over $2 million and pushed for a $5 million federal earmark for the Hormel Institute, a “Minnesota-based medical research center with a history of working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China,” which has been implicated in spreading the coronavirus. The institute also reportedly partnered with the Beijing Genomics Institute, “a group labeled by the Pentagon as a Chinese military company,’” according to Comer.
Comer says concerns were raised after the committee began investigating “federal agencies’ responses to CCP influence and infiltration tactics, including the FBI’s own strategy.” After a July 2024 FBI briefing on CCP influence operations, committee members surmised “Walz’s history with CCP-affiliates bears characteristics of CCP influence operations.”
“The Committee is concerned that Mr. Walz’s involvement with Chinese entities and officials may have allowed the CCP to influence his decision-making as a congressman and governor and potentially would allow the CCP to influence the White House should Mr. Walz be elected vice president,” Comer said.
According to Walz, he’s visited China roughly 30 times and is proud of his connection, which began in 1989. Walz first taught a year abroad in China after the June 3-4, 1989, Tiananmen Massacre. While estimates vary, “hundreds to thousands of protesters were killed … and as many as 10,000 were arrested” after the Chinese government enacted martial law to squash pro-democracy protests. Walz told VOA News, “I felt it was more important than ever to go, to make sure that story was told, and to let Chinese people know we were standing there, we were with them.”
Upon his return, he told Nebraska’s Chadron Record, “the Chinese have been mistreated and cheated by their government for years.” If they had different leaders, “there are no limits on what they could do. … [They] are such kind, generous, capable people. They just gave and gave and gave to me.”
The experience had such an impact Walz’s wife, Gwen, that she said they got married on the fifth anniversary of the massacre. “He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” she told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald. They also “established a summer trip to China for their students and traveled there nearly every summer through 2003,” according to her first lady bio.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has also raised concerns about Walz’s China connection, told The Center Square, “If you look at Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz and Colin Allred,” his Democratic challenger in the U.S. Senate race, “they have all been systematically, far too cozy with communist China.”
Cruz has long warned about CCP threats, including infiltrating American universities, espionage, intellectual property theft, Chinese companies buying land near U.S. military installations, perpetrating extensive human rights abuses, murder, and torture, among other examples.
“China poses the single greatest geopolitical threat to the United States for the next hundred years,” he told The Center Square. “When I was saying that a decade ago, I was a lonely voice in Washington. All the Democrats disagreed with me, and a lot of the Republicans did too. They looked at China and they saw nothing but dollar signs. I do think that has changed, and I think Covid has changed.” He says the U.S. must take “a systematic, comprehensive strategy to fight back against communist China, very much like what we had with the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan.”
Walz served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China for nine years, supporting several human rights initiatives. He told Agri-Pulse he “totally disagrees” that the U.S. should have an adversarial relationship with China but “the U.S. must stand firm on what the Chinese are doing in the south China sea. … It is our business what happens in the South China Sea because freedom of navigation to move our crops and to move our products is critically important to our economy as well as our national security. … We’ll trade with China but they have to play by the rules, both from an environmental, from a fair trade, and also from a human rights perspective.”
Under former President Donald Trump, tariffs were imposed on China, which the Biden-Harris administration continued. Trump says if elected he will expand them.
