The truth behind the conspiracies on Tim Walz’s China ties

Tim Walz has been attacked from all angles by Republicans in the two days since he was unveiled as Kamala Harris’s running mate to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance in November.

The mild-mannered Midwesterner and Minnesota governor, a 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard and former high school teacher, has been called everything from a “radical leftist” to “Tampon Tim” as the opposition scrambles to define and discredit him in the eyes of voters.

So far, little has stuck, prompting Trump’s allies to turn to Walz’s ties to China as a fresh avenue of attack.

“This is a ticket that wants this country to go communist immediately if not sooner,” Trump told Fox and Friends in a phone interview on Wednesday morning – one of a half-dozen scattergun critiques he fired on Walz.

On the campaign trail, Vance, with whom the governor will compete to peel away crucial Rust Belt votes, has already accused him of wanting to “ship more manufacturing jobs to China”.

And on social media, Richard Grenell, Trump’s former US ambassador to Germany, posted in response to the 60-year-old’s selection for the Democratic ticket: “Communist China is very happy with Tim Walz as Kamala’s VP pick. No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz.”

In China itself, local internet users have even speculated that Walz was an undercover CIA agent responsible for stirring up the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, according to The Times.

It’s an outlandish claim which appears to be premised solely on the fact that Walz happened to be in China at the time.

So what is the truth behind Walz’s links with China?

It’s true that the Nebraska native, then 25 and a novice teacher, taught English and American history and culture in Foshan in the southeastern Guangdong