Tim Walz has really improved his career lately by calling Republicans "weird." Maybe a guy who chose his wedding date to help him remember the Tiananmen Square massacre and spent his honeymoon in China should think twice about calling other people weird.

After graduating from Nebraska’s Chadron State College [in 1989], Walz, then 25 years old, went to teach English and American history to high-school students in Foshan, a city in China’s southern Guangdong province, as part of a yearlong Harvard University program blessed by Washington. 

The Minnesota governor and freshly minted Democratic vice-presidential nominee has described the experience as humbling and formative. It was also the first of some 30 visits that Walz has made to China as educator, businessman and politician that took him to far corners of the country and have given him insight into America’s relationship with its biggest global competitor...

After teaching, Walz formed a travel company and for years led American students on tours to China—one in 1994 doubled as his honeymoon, according to a profile that year in the Star-Herald of Scottsbluff, Neb. In fact, Walz planned his wedding date to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown on June 4: “He wanted to have a date he’d always remember,” his future wife, then known as Gwen Whipple, told the newspaper. 

How many elected officials spent their honeymoons in communist countries? Walz is the only one I know of besides Bernie Sanders who spent his honeymoon in Russia. Is it nefarious? Not necessarily but it is pretty unusual. One could even say it's weird and according to Tim Walz, weird is bad.

The other side to this story is that Walz hasn't been shy about criticizing China's government over the years.

As a congressman, he met the Dalai Lama and – before his jailing – the high-profile Hong Kong democracy activist, Joshua Wong. Both men would place at the top of the Chinese government’s list of public enemies...

Mr Walz lent his strong backing to the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which imposed sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials for human rights abuses during the city's democracy protests.

Jeffrey Ngo, a democracy activist now based in the US, has praised Mr Walz's commitment to getting the legislation passed in 2019.

So Walz has shown some opposition to the Chinese government but he's also said some pretty worrisome things about his stance toward China.

A pro-Trump super PAC posted an interview on X in which Walz gave as a member of Congress where he said he didn’t “fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship.” The Republican National Committee shared an old video of Walz saying he is “pretty friendly with China.”

The Trump campaign promoted a Fox News segment on social media that slammed him as “Great Walz of China.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) argued on X that “Walz is an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders.” And the Heritage Foundation alleged that Walz is compromised by Chinese government influence efforts, pointing to circumstantial ties with Chinese officials.

Maybe he's trying to be diplomatic but that sort of talk seems really out of place at this point in time. Hong Kong's freedom has vanished. Xi Jinping has vowed to do the same with Taiwan sooner or later. China continues to try to claim and militarize territory along the border with India and in the South China Sea. They steal our intellectual property at every opportunity. They bribe academics and lure them into sharing their research with China. They threaten ex-pats living in the US who dare to be critical of their government. They send spy balloons over our territory. They cozy up to Russia and effectively prop up its economy while it wages war in Ukraine. They abduct and reeducate their own people, often putting them in prison until they confess to made up crimes. In short, they run a communist police state in which anyone who steps out of line can instantly be silenced or imprisoned. And of course they refuse to answer real questions about the origins of the coronavirus that killed millions of people around the world.

I think the appropriate question for Tim Walz is this one: At what point does being friendly with China just not make sense anymore? 

Maybe you could get away with that in 2016 when Walz gave that interview to Agri-Pulse but in 2024, after Xi has repeatedly shown his true colors, it sounds incredibly naïve and arguably dangerous.

So what does China think about Tim Walz? That seems to be a mixed bag. Some are hopeful he could be a bridge to a better relationship. Others are concerned his focus on Tiananmen Square means he's not a fan of the CCP. I hope the latter group are right but at this point it's a little hard to tell.