Legal Group Launches Sweeping Probe Into Tim Walz’s China Ties

America First Legal has opened a new investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s “extensive, multi-decade entanglement with the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” the group announced in a press release on Tuesday.

On August 16, 2024, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) opened a congressional investigation into alleged ties between Walz and Chinese government officials. Comer reported that Walz has visited China at least 30 times and operated Travel Adventures Inc., a for-profit enterprise that organized trips to China for American children from 1991 through 2003.

In addition, Walz was a fellow at the Macau Polytechnic University during his time in the U.S. House of Representatives, a Chinese institution that characterizes itself as having a “long held devotion to and love for the motherland.”

The Minnesota governor also delivered a speech alongside the President of a Chinese organization the State Department “exposed as a CCP effort to influence and co-opt local leaders,” Comer’s press release noted. FBI investigators told the committee that “the Bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force investigates CCP activity that is similar to China’s engagement with Governor Walz.”

Several Minnesota universities were also appear to have collaborated with the Chinese government’s Confucius Institute programs. According to the Chinese government, the project is merely a means to improve foreign relations and promote the exchange of Chinese culture. However, the program has been effectively halted in the U.S. after the State Department designated the Confucius Institute as a “foreign mission” of the PRC.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the institute “an entity advancing Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign on U.S. campuses and K-12 classrooms,” in a memo detailing the official designation in 2020. “Universities around the country and around the world are examining the Confucius Institutes’ curriculum and the scope of Beijing’s influence in their education systems. The United States wants to ensure that students on U.S. campuses have access to Chinese language and cultural offerings free from the manipulation of the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies.”

It is believed that there were at least two Confucius Institutes in Minnesota, hosted by the University of Minnesota and St. Cloud State University (SCSU), during Walz’s time in office.

“Despite pressure from the Trump Administration and Congress forcing many institutions of higher education to close their affiliated Confucius Institutes, the one at SCSU remained one of only ten that were still open by September 2023,” AFL noted.

Since the crackdown on the Confucius Institute program, the National Association of Scholars reports that the CCP has shifted to “Confucius Classrooms” initiatives in American primary schools, including one that operates in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

It is not clear what, if anything, Gov. Walz has done to prevent the CCP from using Minnesota’s taxpayer-funded schools and universities as propaganda outlets or, as a recent House report documents, from taking advantage of his State’s universities to develop and advance the PRC’s semiconductors, artificial intelligence, or hypersonic, nuclear, or bio-weapons,” AFL’s press release continued.

In order to “shed light on Gov. Walz’s CCP ties,” AFL is demanding all records, communications or calendar entries containing the term “Confucius Institute,” any communications with employees of the Ministry of Education of the PRC, the Beijing Genomics Institute, or members of the Chinese Communist Party, and any records related to Tim Walz’s connections with and travel to China.

“The Trump Administration and its bipartisan partners in the Congress had no illusions about the Chinese Communist Party’s nature and intentions. Accordingly, they took strong action to expose and terminate the CCP’s influence operations in the United States, including its many Confucius Centers around the country, and to protect our research enterprise,” America First Legal Senior Vice President Reed D. Rubinstein said in a statement.

“By contrast, Gov. Walz’s long and troubling history of sympathetic engagement with the Chinese Communist Party and its instrumentalities suggests, at best, a blind disregard for our national security. The truth about Gov. Walz must be exposed.”