DEMOCRATIC vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has been accused of making misleading remarks about his past ahead of Tuesday’s debate with his Republican counterpart J.D. Vance.
The Minnesota Governor is reported to have claimed he was in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre when Chinese authorities brutally crushed pro-democracy protesters.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz[/caption]
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance[/caption]
This despite the fact that publicly available evidence suggests Walz was not in Hong Kong or Mainland China at the time.
In a 2019 radio interview posted on Tuesday by CNN, Walz, who is going head-to-head with Ohio Senator J.D. Vance in CBS’s vice-presidential debate, stated he was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, the day that China’s military opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing following seven weeks of demonstrators.
The massacre left more than 500 people dead.
In 2014, Walz also made a statement during a hearing that he was in the then-British colony of Hong Kong in May 1989.
During the hearing marking 25 years since the massacre, Walz testified: “As a young man I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong province and was in Hong Kong in May 1989.
“As the events were unfolding, several of us went in. I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.
“There was a large number of people – especially Europeans, I think – very angry that we would still go after what had happened.”
He went on: “But it was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people, and the opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important.”
On Monday, Minnesota Public Radio contradicted those claims by saying that he appears to have been in Nebraska instead.
The comments have been seized on by Republicans as part of what AP News described as a “broader pattern of inaccuracies.”
Walz has previously been accused of misrepresenting elements of his past, including the type of infertility treatment his family received, and his rank in the National Guard.
The Walz campaign has also faced claims of giving conflicting accounts of his drunk driving arrest in 1995.
Walz claimed in the past that he visited China more than 30 times, although his campaign later admitted the true number was “closer to 15.”
