Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts

Tim Walz is not soft on China. That hasn't stopped the attacks

Studying Tim Walz’s career and then seeing what other people have said about it has been revealing. In a bad way!

If you’re not on social media, well, congratulations! Second, you’re missing how incredibly toxic the discourse on Walz/China has become. Here’s Ted Cruz:

and Tom Cotton

I assure you: these kinds of insinuations about Walz’s connections to China are commonplace on social media and in the right-wing infosphere more generally. It sure feels like there’s something wrong here, doesn’t it? Nudge nudge.

The publicly available record suggests that these attacks are not just groundless but utterly groundless. Cruz quote-tweets someone saying that “someone should look into” why Walz has been to China so much. Gee, maybe someone should!

• The Wall Street Journal looked into it

• NBC News looked into it

• The Guardian looked into it

• The BBC looked into it

• The New York Times looked into it

• Foreign Policy (hey, that’s me!) looked into it

Here is the summary of what everyone has found:

• Tim Walz likes China

• Tim Walz has long criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s record on human rights, particularly the crackdown on protesters in 1989 and the cultural genocide of Tibet

• Tim Walz (and his wife) ran a business to take students to China

• Tim Walz has basically said the same things about all of this since the 1990s

There is no mystery here. In fact, if anything, it’s surprising how easy it is to show that Walz’s public record is not mysterious. Even his student exchange company is pretty non-mysterious! Walz was an educator with connections in China who was serving a market niche in the hopes of making some coin—we all know that he’s not a rich man and, reading between the lines, I suspect that money was even less plentiful in the Walz household in the 1990s. A few extra thousand dollars per summer probably made a difference! Nor is it like he was concealing his activities—they were literally front page news in his community! Repeatedly.

Not only is there no mystery, there’s no mystery that there’s no mystery. Many journalists (and one dirtbag academic) have looked at the clips and otherwise reported out Walz’s early China connections. Everyone is coming to the same conclusions: he’s not a dove and he’s not a hawk. The charge that he’s a patsy of Beijing falls apart if you read, basically, any other sentence from these articles than the two or three quotations or out-of-context facts. (“Why did he go to China 30 times?” He was running a business. “Why did he say he was treated well by the Chinese?” Because the people he worked and lived with treated him nicely?)

(Incidentally, there is one candidate who will be on federal ballots across the country in November with a history of dodgy business dealings with foreign governments and other actors that call into question specific decisions. It’s not Tim Walz.)

If anything, the attacks on Walz seem a little too desperate. There’s no follow-up. It’s meant as an attack on Walz but it just lets people bring up his criticisms of China. And the amount of nuance in Walz’s record is shockingly calibrated to where Americans are right now on the issue of U.S. relations with China.

Perceptions of U.S. relations with China are sensitive to question wording. If you ask Americans to label China as an ally or enemy, as YouGov does, you get a huge fraction saying “enemy”:

But if, like Pew, you offer an intermediate category—like “competitor”—a lot of the “enemy” support vanishes:

Still a big negative shift, but one that’s much more in line with “a rival we take seriously but trade with” than “an existential threat we have to break”.

I’m not in the game of shilling for individual politicians. I’d been curious about Walz and China because I also spent time there (as a college student) and also (to a much smaller extent—much) taught some elementary school kids some English while I was studying in Shanghai. And I also came back with views on China pretty similar to Walz’s!

So when I say that I’m deeply dismayed, or even more, about how Walz’s time in China is being portrayed, it’s because I have a different kind of skin in the game—one in which I’m afraid that we’re going to get into some Red (Yellow?) Scare-style attacks on anyone who says anything about China more nuanced than “bad scary Communist threat”. Fighting back against this kind of lazy attack is important not just because of this specific context but because we have to resist—to steal a phrase—the closing of the American mind.