In the past, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz said he was in Hong Kong during the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, where pro-democracy protesters were attacked and killed by the Chinese military. On Tuesday night, Walz admitted that he “misspoke.”
He was in Hong Kong during the summer of the riots in Tiananmen Square. However, he wasn’t there in June 1989, when the police cracked down in and around the square in Beijing, China.
Walz had said in the past that he was in Hong Kong during the deadly protests, but news reports showed that he wasn’t there.
In the debate with Sen. JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, Walz said that the false comments were made out of rhetorical exuberance and not on purpose to mislead people.
For Walz, it wasn’t all good. “There are times when I’m a flake.”
“There will be times when I talk a lot,” he said. “I’ll get caught up in the talk.”
One of Vice President Kamala Harris’ main points in her race for president is that people can’t trust former President Donald Trump to tell the truth. Walz’s false claim that he was in Hong Kong during a major event in world history opens up a weakness that Republicans will no doubt try to use against him.
As Walz spoke, he tried to change the subject of the question to his job as a young teacher who took groups of students to China to learn about a different culture.
Walz first went to China after finishing from college in 1989. He stopped in Hong Kong, which was a British colony at the time. Through Harvard’s WorldTeach programme, he taught English and American history and culture at a high school in Foshan, a city in southern China, for a year.
Walz said that he was in Hong Kong “on June 4 when Tiananmen happened” in an episode of the podcast “Pod Save America” in February.
He said that the violent event, in which thousands of people are thought to have died and Beijing’s relations with other countries were badly strained, made him want to go to mainland China even more.
Minnesota Public Radio was the first to question when he got to Hong Kong. They used a story from a Nebraska newspaper in August 1989 that said Walz was leaving for China that month.
When asked about the difference on Tuesday, the Harris-Walz team agreed that Walz had said something wrong but did not say why. The campaign said Walz has probably only been to China 15 times, not the 30 times he has said in the past.
One person who knows Walz well said that he was trying to say that some people in his teaching programme thought about dropping out after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, but he kept going because he thought it was important for the Chinese people to learn about American democracy and history.
Walz said at the debate on Tuesday, “This is about trying to understand the world.”
It’s no secret that Walz doesn’t like China’s trade practices or the way it’s acting more aggressively in the South China Sea. But he has also talked about ways that the U.S. and China, which has what is thought to be the most important two-way relationship in the world, could work together.
In a 2016 video interview, he said, “I don’t think that our relationship with China has to be hostile all the time.”
People who want to be tough on China and its Communist Party have pointed to Walz’s time in China as a reason to be suspicious, even though it’s not mentioned in his background on the Harris campaign website.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who is the head of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to give him information about Walz’s “connections with the CCP” on Monday.
A few hours before Tuesday’s debate, the Trump team sent out an email saying that Walz was “cosy with China” because he had been there 30 times.
Republicans have also criticised Walz for making other false claims, even though Trump does the same thing all the time.
Walz was in the service for 24 years but was never sent to a combat zone. In August, he said that he “misspoke” in a 2018 video that the Harris campaign shared when he said that guns should be used “in war.”
Vance also said that Walz was lying when he said that he and his wife Gwen had their children through in vitro fertilisation. They used intrauterine fertilisation, which is a different type of assisted reproduction technology.
A spokesman for the Harris-Walz campaign said Walz “was using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments” when he spoke before.