Exclusive—Seamus Bruner: Seven Troubling Tim Walz Connections to Communist China

Minnesota Governor and Vice-Presidential hopeful Tim Walz has an abnormal relationship with China.

“No matter how long I live, I will never be treated that well again…it was an excellent experience,” Walz said upon his return from the first of many trips there. Walz claims that his Chinese hosts lavished him with “more gifts than I could bring home.”

Walz and his supporters would like us to believe that his cozy ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are not unusual. In fact, he is “hawkish” and staunch critic of the CCP’s human rights abuses, his media allies say. The Chinese have an expression for the practice of providing cover for the communist regime while issuing the occasional muted critiques: it’s called “big help with a little bad mouth.”

As Breitbart News reported, Walz first visited China in 1989 under the auspices of a now-shuttered Harvard program called WorldTeach. Walz and became so enamored with the country that he and his wife honeymooned there after their marriage on June 4, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Walz “wanted to have a [wedding anniversary] date he’ll always remember,” according to his wife.

The Walz newlyweds brought sixty students with them on their honeymoon, kicking off the first of many student exchange trips to the communist country. Walz and his wife set up a company, Education Travel Adventures Inc., to facilitate the trips to China. They ultimately ended up taking more than thirty trips there.

Walz’s last known trip to China was in 2015, but he continues to meet with communist officials and headline CCP-backed events. Walz’s deep and abiding ties to China—including multiple connections to CCP intelligence front organizations—present troubling national security questions about a potential Harris-Walz administration.

Here are Walz’s top seven connections to the CCP that demand explanation.

1. The CCP approved and even subsidized Walz’s student exchanges.

After his first trip to China in 1989, Walz returned to his teaching job in America and hung a “Chinese banner” in his school office. By 1993, Walz was taking American students on visits to China where he told his students to “downplay their American-ness.”

When asked about why he was so interested in China so early on, Walz stated “China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went.” According to U.S. national security expert John Schindler, “no American would be allowed to run academic exchanges for a couple of decades, on the CCP’s dime, without [Ministry of State Security] approval. It just wouldn’t happen.”

Shockingly, Chinese authorities reportedly covered “a large part of the cost” of the 1993 summer trip. The next year, Walz and the Chinese government jointly sponsored scholarships for American students to visit China. Between 1989 and 2003, Walz travelled with hundreds of students to China.

Did Walz or his travel company, Education Travel Adventures Inc., receive any money from the Chinese government? His public financial disclosures do not go back far enough to know.

2. A CCP diplomat and other CCP government officials attended Walz’s gubernatorial inauguration in January 2019.

A translation from a Chinese government source reveals that, “Acting Consul General Liu Jun congratulated Governor Waltz and expressed his expectation to strengthen cooperation with the new Minnesota government to jointly promote the friendly and cooperative relations between Minnesota and China.”

Why were CCP members at the inauguration of a Minnesota governor and would Chinese diplomats congratulate a sincere critic of China’s human rights abuses?

3. The CCP Diplomat left the Walz inauguration to meet with Walz cronies at Minnesota’s premier globalist non-governmental organization (NGO), Minnesota Global.

According the translated Chinese government press release, “Acting Consul General Liu congratulated [Global Minnesota] on the successful holding of the China Theme Year event and said that the Consulate General looks forward to continuing to strengthen communication with [Global Minnesota] in the new year to promote friendly cooperation between Minnesota and China.”

Global Minnesota is close with Walz and has sponsored at least one his foreign trips (to Finland). Last December, Walz awarded a Global Minnesota nominee for a business award.

Global Minnesota is affiliated with globalist entities like the United Nations and frequently invites Walz for speaking engagements (in 2020, 2021, and 2022).

4. Walz has close connections to a Twin Cities-based organization that houses an alleged secret CCP police station—one of only seven secret CCP police stations in the U.S.

In 2022, Minnesota Global partnered with group called the Chinese American Association of Minnesota (CAAM) to send delegations to China.

CAAM has been accused of housing a CCP intelligence agency “Service Center” (which is effectively a secret CCP police station) in Minnesota. The Daily Caller reported:

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD) — which at least one U.S. government commission has characterized as a “Chinese intelligence service” — operates so-called “Overseas Chinese Service Centers” (OCSCs) that are housed within various U.S.-based nonprofits. OCSCs were ostensibly set up to promote Chinese culture and assist Chinese citizens living abroad, according to Chinese government records.

In April 2023, the Justice Department busted an alleged CCP Ministry of Public Security outpost, which the DOJ called a “secret police station” used to “monitor and intimidate dissidents” and other critics of Beijing.

Why has Walz failed to shut down this Overseas Chinese Service Center operating out of Minnesota?

5. Then-Congressman Walz praised a CCP-backed event that he attended with CCP diplomats in 2018. 

According the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Chicago, the event Walz attended was “The Greatest Spirit: Embrace China—Beautiful Sichuan” hosted at Minnesota University’s Northrop Theater.

The event was sponsored by the CCP’s All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC). According to the Chinese government website:

US Congressman Waltz commented that 30 years ago, he celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival for the first time in Foshan, Guangdong. As Mid-Autumn Festival stands out in Chinese culture as a special day of family reunion, it was his pleasure to enjoy this performance with everyone together. China and the US have a solid tradition of cultural exchanges, and hopefully both countries can maintain this tradition and amicable relations.

6. Less than one year into his first gubernatorial term, Walz was an honored guest speaker at multiple CCP-backed influence operation events in 2019.

Ten months after his inauguration, Walz accepted a speaking gig from a CCP-backed event, joining the president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) on the short list of speakers.

Walz was invited to “speak about his experiences [in China] and Minnesota’s connections with China.” Walz also was a guest speaker at the U.S. China Peoples Friendship Association convention in 2019 (alongside CPAFFC President Li Xaolin).

The CPAFFC is effectively a CCP “United Front” cutout that is accused of “directly and malignly influencing” state and local politicians in the U.S., according to the State Department. The CCP’s United Front influence operation is specifically tasked with “co-opting and neutralizing threats to the party’s rule and spreading its influence and propaganda overseas.” Beijing view United Front operation “magic weapon” to advance CCP objectives around the world.

Why is Walz so cozy with obvious CCP intelligence operatives and are they paying him for these speeches?

7. Walz has a long history of making outlandishly pro-CCP comments.

Walz has said that “going [to China] was one of the best things I have ever done” and that if the Chinese “had the proper leadership, there are no limits to what they could accomplish.” He claims that his teaching position Macau Polytechnic University “helped develop his knowledge of China’s unique international status.”

In 2011, Walz said he developed “a great admiration for and a close connection with the Chinese people” after teaching there. He indirectly praised the CCP’s brutal police when he said that China had “almost no crime.”

Walz has also claimed the U.S. does not need to have an “adversarial relationship” with China and that “there was no anti-American feeling [in China] whatsoever.”

Notably, Walz’s gentle criticisms often ignore the aspect of the Chinese system responsible for the brutality: communism. And he recently compared socialism to “neighborliness.” Walz seems to view human rights abuses as events that all countries commit from time to time and move on.

On the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre, Walz said that “every nation has its dark periods that it must come to grips with.” And that “this Nation [the US] is no exception.” While this is true, Walz refers to events in American history that happened over a century ago with far less bloodshed.

Meanwhile, the CCP’s ongoing “break their lineage, break their roots” persecution of ethnic minorities in China is rightly characterized as a crime against humanity and even a genocide.

Why does Tim Walz seem to downplay the undeniable bloodshed of communism and socialism?

This is a developing story.

Seamus Bruner is the author of Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life and Peter Schweizer’s Head of Research at the Government Accountability Institute. Follow him @SeamusBruner.