In the summer of 1989, Tim Waltz faced a difficult choice.

A recent college graduate from a small town in Nebraska, he turned down a stable 9-to-5 job to travel across the ocean to teach at a local high school in China. He was already in Hong Kong, a city adjacent to mainland China, when PLA tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush pro-democracy protests.

Rumors were flying, including that civil war might break out in China. Many foreigners had fled, including most of the American teachers who taught there. Should he return to the United States, or continue on to China?

He decided to continue on his way.

“My thought at the time was that diplomacy was a multifaceted endeavor, including, of course, between people to people,” Waltz said.Recollectionduring a U.S. Congressional hearing in 2014 marking the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests. “The opportunity to go to a Chinese high school at that critical moment was really important to me at the time.”

Waltz taught English for a year in southern China, the beginning of his decades-long relationship with the country. While teaching high schools in Nebraska and Minnesota, Waltz and his wife, Gwen, frequently took students to China in the 1990s and early 2000s to help them learn about Chinese history and culture. Waltz has said he has traveled to China more than 30 times, including on his honeymoon.

The deep history of engagement with China reflects a little-known international dimension for the Democratic vice presidential candidate. If elected, Waltz would bring an unusually rich personal experience with China to the White House, which supporters say could be an asset at a time of turmoil in U.S.-China relations.

But so far, the Democratic presidential campaign has rarely mentioned Waltz’s experience in China, preferring to portray the Minnesota governor as a loving Midwestern dad, coach and teacher. And the campaign has yet to articulate how either Vice President Kamala Harris or Waltz would approach China, where both the Biden and Trump administrations have taken a hard line.

Republicans, by contrast, have begun to make a case for Waltz’s experience in China, accusing him of being soft on a country that the United States now views as its biggest military and economic rival.

Richard Grenell, who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany and as acting director of national intelligence during the Trump administrationWrote on X“Communist China” is “very happy” that Harris chose Waltz as her running mate. Arkansas Senator Tom CottonexplainWaltz should “give the American people an explanation for his 35-year-long unusual relationship with communist China.”

Spokespeople for Harris and Waltz’s campaign accused Republicans of “distorting basic facts” and “lying desperately” to divert attention from former President Trump’s agenda.

“Throughout his career, Governor Walz has never bowed to the Chinese Communist Party, has fought for human rights and democracy, and has always put American jobs and manufacturing first,” said spokesman James Singer. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will ensure we win the competition with China and will always defend our values ​​and interests in the face of Chinese threats.”

Waltz’s record as a member of the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019 shows that he often used his personal experience in China to make sharp criticisms of China’s human rights record. He was particularly interested in Tibet and Hong Kong and had met with the Dalai Lama and Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong democracy activist.

Before Waltz became an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, he was a curious college graduate eager to learn more about the world beyond his farms and ranches in Nebraska.

At 25, Waltz joined a program at WorldTeach, a nonprofit organization affiliated with Harvard University, and taught at No. 1 Middle School in Foshan, a southern Chinese city not far from Hong Kong. Foshan No. 1 Middle School is located in one of the city’s most historic neighborhoods, where lush banyan trees drape aerial roots across the sidewalks and streets.

Waltz quickly adapted to the daily life of the small-town campus, even as the chaos caused by the Tiananmen Square crackdown, 1,800 kilometers away, was sweeping the country. He taught four English and American history classes a day, each with about 65 students. As the school’s first American teacher, he enjoyed special benefits such as air conditioning and a monthly salary of about $80, twice what local teachers earn.

The students loved their “big nose” teacher and gave him the nickname “Fields of China” because the students admired him.explainHe said that his kindness was “as vast as the land of China.” On Christmas Day, some of his students and friends cut down a pine tree, decorated it and sent it to his room.

“No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated this well again,” Waltz told the Star-Herald in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, in 1990.

He also took a train to Beijing and visited Tiananmen Square, where the People’s Liberation Army had recently gunned down hundreds of protesters and bystanders.

After returning to Nebraska in 1990, he told the Star-Herald that going to China was “one of the best things” he had ever done. But he also said he felt the Chinese people had long been mistreated and deceived by their government.

“If they had the right leaders, there’s no limit to what they could accomplish,” Walz said at the time. “They are such kind, generous, capable people.”

In 1994, Waltz got a job teaching social sciences at Union High School in western Nebraska. There he met a colleague, Gwen Whipple, and fell in love with her. They were married on June 4 of that year, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. He would later say, “I will definitely remember that date.”

Soon after their marriage, they embarked on what became, in effect, their honeymoon: a field trip to China with 60 students.

Waltz was determined to share with students the wonder of discovering a wider world beyond small-town America, according to interviews with four former students and a professor who took the annual trips the Waltzes organized in the 1990s.

Most of the students had never been abroad, and while they were in China, they spent almost all of their time outside the classroom. In addition to sightseeing, they met with a tai chi master, practiced using chopsticks at a Chinese family dinner, and tried their hand at calligraphy.

On a trip in 1993, Waltz took American students to meet his former students at Foshan No. 1 Middle School. A friend of Waltz accompanied them throughout the two-week trip and served as their guide. The students loved the friend so much that some cried during the final farewell, recalled a student named Kyle Lyleke.

“It was clear that Tim could structure these trips around people,” recalled Laerke, now 47.

Former student Shay Armstrong, who took part in the 1993 and 1994 trips to China, recalled learning about some of the more frightening aspects of Communist Party rule during her travels. Students heard about the harsh “one-child” policy, under which most couples who had more than one child were forced to pay a fine.

She said that during the visit to Tiananmen Square, Waltz told students about the history of the bloody crackdown and Mao Zedong’s brutal rule.

“That trip wasn’t all love and rainbows,” Armstrong, now 46, recalled.

The Waltzes continued to take students to China after they moved to Mankato, Minnesota, in 1996, organizing the trips through a company they founded called Educational Travel Adventures.

While a member of Congress, Waltz never shied away from talking about his experiences in China.

But he has also been critical of the Chinese government from the beginning. During his 12 years in the House, Waltz’s criticism of China’s human rights record became increasingly sharp, especially after Xi Jinping came to power and the Chinese government became more authoritarian.

Waltz served on the Congressional Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers focused on monitoring and reporting on human rights and rule of law in China. Committee records show other members often praised Waltz’s expertise.

“You are of great value to our committee,” Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and then-committee chairman, told Walz during a 2011 hearing.explain.

Waltz co-sponsored aresolutiondemanding that the Chinese government release dissident and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.CriticizedChina’s unfair trade practices and crackdown on human rights lawyers and religious groups.

In 2015, WaltzParticipatedA U.S. delegation led by then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made a rare visit to Tibet, and the following year he had lunch with the Dalai Lama, which he later posted on social media as a “life-changing” lunch.

A prominent Hong Kong democracy activist, Ao Zhuoxuan, said Waltz had been the only House Democrat willing to continue to support the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, praising him for his unremitting support for the bill, which requires the U.S. government to sanction officials responsible for human rights violations in Hong Kong.

Ao Zhuoxuan said Walz’s support helped the bill get through critical moments until it was finally passed.

“Waltz may be the presidential and vice presidential candidate of either major party with the strongest stance on human rights and China in recent years, if not ever,” said Ao Zhuoxuan.

As his term in Congress draws to a close, WaltzcontinueTrump has stressed the importance of finding areas of cooperation with China. But he has also begun to question the long-held view that opening up China to trade will make it more open and democratic.

“I did have illusions that trade liberalization and openness would have a significant impact on the liberation of individual freedom,” Waltz said in a 2016 speech.Congressional Hearings“I now find that this is not the case.”

It has been decades since Waltz went to Foshan, and the high school that sparked his lifelong interest in China has now expanded significantly.

When reporters arrived at the high school last Wednesday, the news that Waltz had become the Democratic vice presidential candidate had generated a different response.

As they emerged from the school gates, students in blue and white uniforms said their school’s relationship with a suddenly famous American politician had become a hot topic in classrooms and online chat rooms.

Meanwhile, a school official said the school had no comment on Waltz. Guards at the school gate prevented reporters from entering the school to visit the school history museum.