What really happened on Tim Walz’s trips to China

Tim Walz would like to take Donald Trump to China – at least that’s what he said during this week’s vice presidential debate.

Walz taught as a postgraduate in his 20s in southern China. And later, as a high school teacher in Nebraska and Minnesota, he led students on field trips around the country from 1994 to 2005. “I believe that Donald Trump should have come with us on one of these trips,” he said during the debate. “I guarantee you he wouldn’t praise Xi Jinping over Covid, and I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing.”

So what would Did Trump learn about Walz on a field trip to China? Conversations with four students and a companion who traveled with Walz in 2005 gave us a glimpse into what the itinerary might have looked like.

Trump would have traveled with 23 students on a two-week trek across the country, from a local school in southern China to the Forbidden City in Beijing. He would not have appeared at press conferences with heads of government. But he would have learned to bargain with street vendors. He would have figured out how to communicate about football when he was at a loss for words. He would have learned to appreciate people from another culture – chatting with them on night trains, riding his bike past their monuments, and seeing their cities and houses up close. And he even indulged in a group foot massage that Walz had booked for everyone.

Republicans pointed out that these trips were evidence that Walz was soft on Beijing and even posed a potential threat to national security.

But Walz’s former students describe him as a sometimes goofy teacher who subscribed to a particular philosophy when it came to China: The oppressive Chinese Communist Party should be treated with great suspicion and control; But the normal, everyday people living under this oppression should be treated with empathy like everyone else. You may speak a different language and live on the other side of the world, he taught his students, but on the things that really matter, they might as well be your neighbor.

At a school in southern China, students played a friendly game of soccer with Chinese students on a dirt field – the Americans in their T-shirts and the Chinese in sports jerseys. They managed to communicate using hand gestures and kicking the ball.

“The [soccer game] was what this trip brought home to me: the world, when you’re young, you think to some extent that everyone is so strange and different from you, but then you go to a foreign country, thousands of them Kilometers away, and you “We all play soccer together,” said Ross Pomeroy, a student on the trip. “We may not speak the same language verbally, but physically and culturally we share common bonds.”

Walz led the students on a journey that showed them completely different parts of China, from the busy streets of Hong Kong—where cheap vendors selling high-priced souvenirs were always important, Walz told them—to the hills of rural southern China: “We saw the wooden huts. We saw people on the farms. And that was an eye-opening experience,” former Walz student Will Handke told me. “It’s one thing to think conceptually that there’s something else out there, but then you see it, you feel it and you smell it, you see the other people and you see that they have the same smile on their faces. ”

Walz challenged her to go beyond her comfort zone and even booked a group foot massage. “At the time I thought, ‘Oh, this is something only women do,’ so it just opened my eyes,” said Matt Olson, another student on the trip in 2005. “It was funny that we did it all did together. It took some of the cliché out of it.”

The group visited all major tourist attractions such as the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. The Mausoleum of Emperor Qinshihuang was particularly exciting for the students who had taken Walz’s global geography course: They had seen the nearly life-size figure of a terracotta warrior at his desk countless times throughout the school year—and now they finally saw the real thing.

Perhaps even more memorable than the historical sites, students said, were the overnight trains that took the group from city to city. The students packed themselves into train compartments, which they often shared with Chinese passengers. The children ran toward the students, shy but eager to practice the English they had learned in school. Passengers asked for pictures to remember their trip with the foreigners.

Some locals became annoyed with the Americans and gave them dirty looks. Walz didn’t let that go. When a passenger insulted the students waiting in line on the train, Walz turned to the man, smiled and, to everyone’s surprise, replied in fluent Mandarin.

The Chinese passenger simply looked at Walz in shock before leaving the students alone.

The last stop on the trip was Beijing. China’s sprawling capital was known for its historic landmarks like the Forbidden City, nestled among modern skyscrapers and global chains like Starbucks. It was also the city where the Tiananmen Square massacre had taken place 16 years earlier.

Although Walz was criticized for falsely claiming that he was in Hong Kong when the massacre took place – he admitted during the debate that he had “misspoken” about the timing and that he was in China later in the summer – there is no doubt that the student led the act. The demonstration left a “lasting impact” on him, as he described it in a congressional hearing in 2014. Hundreds, and by some estimates thousands, of people died fighting for their democratic rights as People’s Liberation Army tanks drove through the streets and soldiers opened fire on demonstrators.

Walz had posted a picture of the famous Tank Man – a protester who stood defiantly in front of a line of tanks that had mowed down demonstrators in Tiananmen Square the day before – on the door of his classroom. In his global geography course, which many of the students had taken on the trip before leaving for China, he taught about the Tiananmen Square massacre and explained the push for democracy and the rebellion against authoritarianism in Asia.

“It felt scary and sad and I was just trying to understand the situation that was unfolding. It’s just kind of heartbreaking and hard to believe that it’s come to this,” Olson said of his visit to what to any other unsuspecting onlooker now looked like a harmless concrete plaza. “[Walz] knew a lot about it. You could see the passion he had about it.”

“I see a lot of demonization of China today,” Pomeroy added. “Separate the government from the people, because the actual people – the everyday people we saw – weren’t much different than us. They were completely normal people. It is unfortunate that many Chinese people have to live under such an authoritarian, repressive, communist regime, which is currently China’s greatest tragedy.”

There were no big lectures or history lessons on the square. Not a word about the fight for democracy or the consequences of brutal oppression. Walz simply let the students absorb the moment – and then took the group photo of the trip on site.