Tim Waltz has lectured international relations at China’s National University and made dozens of visits to the communist country, many of which are now under scrutiny a week after he was selected as the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, is calling on the Defense Department to investigate whether the Minnesota governor complied with foreign travel reporting requirements “to obtain security clearance during numerous trips,” some of which took place while he was the senior officer in the state’s Army National Guard.
In a letter to the Pentagon on Tuesday, Republican Rep. Banks called the situation a “clear national security risk.”
Until at least 2007, Mr. Waltz was a visiting scholar at the Communist Party-sanctioned Macau Polytechnic University, which was founded in 1981 and is a supporter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project that is the foundation of President Xi Jinping’s aggressive pursuit of influence abroad, according to public documents and media reports.
“This is in line with China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” Macau Polytechnic University president Marcus Yim Sioh Kay said in a statement on the university’s website. “We are committed to nurturing talented people who can contribute to the country and Macau.”
Macau, a former Portuguese colony, was occupied by China in December 1999.
In addition to his teaching job in Macau, Waltz has visited China more than 30 times since the spring of 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy activists was widely condemned in the West.
During his first trip, Mr. Waltz spent a year as a teacher with the help of World Teach, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that sends volunteers to developing countries. The group, started by former Harvard University students, has partnered with Changsha Yuanjing Educational Consulting Co., a company controlled by China’s Ministry of Public Security, public records show.
“As a young man, I was going to teach high school in Foshan, Guangdong province, and I was in Hong Kong in May 1989,” Waltz told the Congressional Committee on China Affairs in 2014. Waltz said he taught American culture and English as a second language to 1,000 high school and middle school students each week.
“A few of us went inside while it was happening,” he said. “I still remember the Hong Kong station, a lot of people, especially from Europe, were very angry that we were still pursuing this.”
For Derek Scissors, a senior fellow and China expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, visiting China during the Tiananmen Square incident was a “mistake.”
“An individual with access to classified information who makes dozens of personal trips to a hostile country clearly poses a national security risk,” Banks wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin dated Aug. 12. “An individual with access to classified information should have the good sense not to make such trips in the first place, and it is the duty of that individual’s superiors and security officials to prevent such dangerous behavior.”
U.S. military personnel are ordered to report such travel, especially if it involves a hostile country, and are required to “fill out a reporting questionnaire” and report any suspicious behavior they encounter, Banks said.
It’s unclear whether Walz notified his superiors at the National Guard about his trip to China, and they didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
“The obvious question is, did Mr. Waltz have (security) clearance and to what extent?” Scissors said.
Scissors noted that attitudes toward China changed during negotiations with the communist country in the mid-1990s, but said traveling to China as an active-duty U.S. soldier could be problematic.
An elated Mr. Waltz said he was showered with gifts by his hosts after his first visit to China. “I’ll never be treated so well again, no matter how long I live,” said Mr. Waltz, 60, who taught American history, culture and English in the southern Chinese city of Foshan in 1990.
Waltz, a former high school teacher, organized annual trips to China for American students.
In 1995, he and his wife registered a for-profit company in Nebraska that took high school students on trips to Communist countries. Disclosure documents show that former teacher and school administrator Gwen Waltz is listed as president of Educational Travel Adventures, and Waltz is listed as secretary and treasurer of a company formed using her Mankato, Minnesota, home address.
They’d been married a year earlier, on June 4, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the end of the deadly Tiananmen Square massacre. “He wanted a date that would be memorable,” Gwen told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald in 1994. The couple spent their honeymoon there, according to the paper.
“The hardest part was telling them apart and remembering their names,” Waltz said, the Star-Herald reported at the time, adding that “in China, students assumed all Americans looked the same.”
Waltz subsequently spoke out for human rights in Hong Kong, co-sponsoring the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2017, which called for the release of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and activist Liu Xiaobo before his death in July that year.
