Sometime in mid November mention of Tim Walz will fade to page 34 and his trips to the funeral of some foreign leader over the next years.
For now he adds headline material to the Harris campaign and a folksy midwestern vibe.
There’s more, it’s important, and I hear very little about it.
Walz lived and worked in China for a year as a young man. Since then he has taken many trips there with his public school students. Walz is what they call a China hand. Walz strikes the right balance, he loves the country and it’s people, he is very critical of their record on human rights. I hope he can help us reshore much of our industry.
China when Walz went there was in the midst of a lot of turmoil. It was only two months after Tiananmen. China was only recently opened up. I search for a way to describe it. Almost like a land in a different century. The economic “miracle” naescent. China then seemed very different, yet under the surface, the same today but with Mao suits.
For years we have viewed China as either a strategic economic interest, or else as a military adversary. I would hope that having Walz in the Harris administration would help to leaven our economic interests by more closely aligning them with our humanitarian ones. In much of the world the US is still looked upon as a very free and egalitarian society, we should support those in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and less well known provinces in their quest for political, religious, legal, speach, and other rights and freedoms.
At the same time we need to change from being a military adversary of China. Neither of us wants a war, it would be a disaster. China is not Putin. China is much more considered in what it does.
East Asia is not inscrutable, but it is as different from South Asian as it is from European culture, and we are lucky to have someone at the top levels of a Harris administration with some insight on the place.
