The Nuanced View on China

Could Tim Walz's China experience make a difference in resolving America's most serious geostrategic conflict?

In one key respect, Tim Walz offers a breath of fresh air in a chaotic US presidential election campaign.  His common-sense approach to tough and complex issues defies the hyper-polarization that has gripped America.  Nowhere is this more evident than in his nuanced views on China.

Not since George H.W. Bush has either major political party offered a candidate for national office with deep personal experience in China.  As Chief of the US Liaison Office in  Beijing in 1974-75, Bush I cherished a “special relationship” with China that lasted though his presidency and continued for the rest of his life. That special relationship spanned 44 years (from 1974 until his death in 2018) that included many ups and downs between the two nations, the low point coming in 1989 with the Tiananmen Square tragedy that occurred in the early months of his presidency. While he was quick to respond and express his outrage over China’s deplorable use of force, President George H.W. Bush stayed firm in maintaining his core view that the US-China relationship would be world’s most consequential bilateral relationship of the 21^st century.

Tim Walz ‘s China experience has been very different. Primarily in his earlier role as an educator, he has been a frequent traveler to China — initially as a high school teacher in Guangdong province but then as  the head of a small business, Educational Travel Adventures, that organized summer visits to China for US high school students. Like former President Bush, the Walz China experience has deep personal roots.  His first trip took place in that same memorable year of 1989, which had a lasting impact on his impressions of what he later called China’s “unthinkable” tendencies.   That impression, in fact, was so deep that Walz chose to get married on June 4, 1994, on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen tragedy.  In the words of his new wife, Gwen Whipple, “He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.”  

And that he certainly did.  As a Minnesota congressman from 2007 to 2019, Walz was especially focused on Chinese human rights issues.  He supported resolutions commemorating the 20^th anniversary of June 1989 as well as congressional actions sympathetic to a number of Chinese activists, including Chen Guangcheng, Liu Xiaobo, those investigating the deaths of school children in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, and pro-democracy groups in Tibet and Hong Kong. But Walz has not been a one-trick pony on China.  While sympathetic to human  rights concerns and Chinese military aggression in the South China Sea, he has also made a special effort to stress the critical importance  of a sustainable US-China relationship.

In Walz’s words after a visit to Tibet in 2015 that included an audience with the Dalai Lama, America’s relationship with China “…is too critically important on trade; it’s too critically important on climate change; it’s too critically important on national security; [and too critically important on] issues of containment of terrorism …”   For Walz, dialogue with China is essential and “absolutely has to happen.” In other words, it should be possible for the United States to walk and chew gum at the same time when it comes to dealing with another superpower. 

I couldn't agree more with the need for a more nuanced approach in addressing China.  As I have stressed in my own commentary, America is now afflicted by a toxic outbreak of Sinophobia that has pushed public opinion on China to an all-time low (chart below), leaving little room for a diversity of views on the broad cross section of issues associated with China. With China vilified as an adversarial threat the likes of which has not seen since the former Soviet Union of the early 1950s, the politics of China bashing has become utterly intolerant of allowing debate, let alone acceptance, of a more nuanced approach. Predictably, the opposition party has already seized on Walz’s China connection as political fodder in a toxic US election climate.

Engagement has, in fact, all but become a four-letter word in the lexicon of the most strident China hawks. When it comes to the China threat, the hawks maintain, you’re either “with us or against us.” Even the more moderate Washington consensus now argues that America’s willingness to agree to China’s WTO accession in 2001 pushed the United States over the edge of a slippery slope in exposing it to what has now become known as the “China shock.” I have found the same binary reaction to the “secretariat proposal” that was featured in my latest book, Accidental Conflict; while audiences in Asia (including China) and Europe generally have been open to discussion of this idea, not so in Washington, where there is nothing but intolerance when it comes to considering a new architecture of engagement. Sadly, in the US, there is no room for anything close to a nuanced view on China.

Could this change if the Democrats prevail in November and Walz , with his more nuanced views on China, were to become Vice President? Right now, there is little ground for such an optimistic outcome.  As I wrote last week, the Harris view is virtually indistinguishable from the Biden view on most key policy issues, including a hawkish view on China.  And, of course, it is rare that any new vice president would play a decisive role in shaping policy outcomes on a high-profile issue like China.   

Notwithstanding those concerns, I think there is an outside chance to hope for an exception in a Harris Administration. First of all, the imperative for a course correction on the US-China conflict cannot be stressed enough.  The relationship is on an unsustainable trajectory and, as I argue in my book, is only a spark away from the kinetic consequences of an accidental conflict.  Second, both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are coming from the same place with respect to their emphasis on South China Sea tensions and concerns over Chinese human rights, especially their shared views over conditions in Xinjiang province and Hong Kong. Third, and admittedly the biggest “if” in my argument, is the leadership gambit — in this case, the opportunity for a new president to make a special mark as a global leader at a time of enormous risk in a deeply troubled world.

I have long held the view that both nations are to blame for the US-China conflict — a relationship problem that ultimately requires a relationship solution.  At the same time, I have also stressed that leadership is an act of political courage  — a courage that will require a bold move by one side to initiate the process of conflict resolution.  In the end, a nuanced view is vital for any leader to break the ice, to enable one side to prioritize re-engagement over digging in its heels on each and every point of friction in a conflicted relationship.  That’s what freed up Richard Nixon to put aside his ideological anti-communist biases and go to China in 1972.  With Walz already holding a nuanced view on China, might he help tip the scales for Kamala Harris?