Walz says he misspoke about his travel during Tiananmen protests

Jenni Marsh, Bloomberg News on Oct 1, 2024

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U.S. Vice Presidential hopeful Tim Walz said he “misspoke” about being in Hong Kong when the deadly Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 erupted, without directly clarifying his whereabouts on June 4 of that year.

The Democratic candidate has claimed several times over the past decade that he was in the former British colony when China’s ruling Communist Party violently quashed the pro-democracy uprising. The New York Times and other outlets reported this week that media accounts from that time suggest he didn’t leave the U.S. until August 1989.

“I got there that summer and misspoke on this,” Walz said, during a televised debate Tuesday evening, after being pressed to explain the discrepancy. But the Minnesota governor, who at times looked nervous during the exchange with Republican JD Vance, followed up with a garbled response that muddied the timeline.

“So, I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests went in,” Walz said.

The Harris-Walz campaign didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment to clarify the remark.

Walz taught English in China’s southern Guangdong province in 1989 and 1990, and subsequently set up a business organizing summer trips to the Asian nation. He got married on the fifth anniversary of the 1989 crackdown, according to his wife Gwen, who told a local newspaper that Walz “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.”

Vance criticized his challenger’s answer, saying it was “important to speak to the American people” when you get something wrong. He repeatedly bashed the Democratic ticket led by Kamala Harris in the November vote as being bad for U.S. workers, saying the current vice president had caused more energy production to be based in China.

“If you’re trying to employ slave laborers in China at $3 a day, you’re going to do that and undercut the wages of American workers,” Vance said. American workers will suffer “unless our country stands up for itself and says you’re not accessing our markets unless you’re paying middle-class Americans a fair wage,” he added.

Walz’s campaign has been forced to defend his own version of his personal history before. His wife previously clarified how they eventually conceived, after Walz repeatedly alluded to in vitro fertilization treatments, despite the couple using a different type of fertility process.

“I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric,” Walz said of his time organizing educational tours to China over the decades.

“I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on those trips with us,” he added. “I guarantee you he wouldn’t be praising Xi Jinping about Covid, and I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing.”

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(With assistance from Akayla Gardner.)

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