As Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance ready for their vice presidential debate in New York City on Oct. 1, voters may want to consider that 15 of America’s 46 presidents were first vice president. This includes Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson following the death of a president; Gerald Ford by succession; and Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden by election.
Historically, this puts the odds of either Governor Walz or Senator Vance eventually becoming president at about one-third. Despite these short odds, conventional wisdom has it that vice presidential candidates don’t decide presidential elections. Yet, this time, these candidates should matter a great deal, at least to voters concerned about the economic and national security threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Here, even a cursory Vance versus Walz comparison reveals a stark contrast between a Trumpian China hawk in Vance and a China dove in Walz.
As is well-documented, communist China’s subversive strategies include wooing foreign academics, businessmen, and politicians so that they knowingly or unknowingly advance the CCP’s agenda.
Walz was born in 1964, just two years before China’s decade-long Maoist Cultural Revolution. From his childhood years, Walz romantically remembers “pictures of Mao Tse-tung, hung in public places and carried in parades.”
In 1989—the year Vance turned 5 and the CCP slaughtered thousands in Tiananmen Square—the 25-year-old Walz took his first China trip and would rave about the “royal treatment” his CCP hosts provided. Walz would gush a mere year after the slaughter at Tiananmen: “No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again. They gave me more gifts than I could bring home. It was an excellent experience.”
By 1994, Walz was honeymooning in Kunming, China, after he had deliberately scheduled his wedding to be on the same day, June 4, as the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. When asked by the Scottsbluff Star-Herald why, wife Gwen said Tim simply “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.”
Between early 1990 and 2008, Walz would establish his own personal private and lucrative business, and bring to China young and persuadable American students who surely were indoctrinated. Walz took “travel cost” payments from the Chinese government as well.
According to Walz’s congressional financial disclosure statements, his China-focused travel company was only dissolved in the fall of 2008, more than a year and a half after he became a member of Congress in January 2007. During that period, Walz would visit China more than 30 times.
Vance’s experience with communist China and its economic aggression couldn’t be more different. That experience is best revealed in his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Vance was born in 1984 in the poor, Rust Belt manufacturing town of Middletown, Ohio. In his heart-wrenching elegy, Vance references the all-American ethos of Hank Williams, Jr.’s country classic “A Country Boy Can Survive” and describes how his hardscrabble childhood was filled with lessons from his Mamaw and uncles in eastern Kentucky, including the family lore of “classic good-versus-evil stories” about “defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes.”
Throughout “Hillbilly Elegy,” the specter of communist China and its destruction of the jobs and factories in Vance’s Rust Bowl environs looms large. In his vice presidential nominee acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, Vance described China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 as a “sweetheart deal” facilitated by out-of-touch Washington politicians and power brokers that “destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.”
Vance himself saw firsthand how communities across the United States were “flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor, and in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl.” Meanwhile, as China entered the WTO in 2001, a 37-year-old Walz continued to capitalize on China’s economic rise at America’s expense, organizing more trips to China through his private travel company.
In 2005, both Vance and Walz were readying to deploy to Iraq, Vance as a Marine, Walz as the command sergeant major of his National Guard unit. Only Vance would go; Walz quit his unit before it was deployed to Iraq in order to run for Congress, was eventually demoted in rank, and later, after he falsely claimed he saw combat, accused of stolen valor.
In 2007, Vance was honorably discharged from the Marines as a corporal after serving in Iraq. Under the G.I. Bill, Vance completed his undergraduate studies at The Ohio State University in just two years, graduating with a double major, summa cum laude and would follow that with a law degree at Yale that Walz would later inexplicably ridicule.
Meanwhile, even as a congressman, Walz worked as an international fellow at Macau Polytechnic University, a state-run Chinese institution that backs CCP dictator Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative and touts its “long held devotion to and love for the [Chinese] motherland.”
In the same year that Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy,” chronicling the economic carnage communist China had inflicted on his community, then-Congressman Walz publicly downplayed the need to stand up to communist China’s aggression, stating in a 2016 interview: “I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree.”
Walz would double down on his CCP accommodation strategy in 2019. As the governor of Minnesota, in opposition to the tariffs that form a vital part of America’s defense against China’s economic aggression, Walz called for President Trump to “end the trade war with China.” In Walz’s world view, “there’s just no substitute for 1.6 billion consumers, who are hungry, to get our China trade negotiations normalized,“ and ”there’s not enough market in the rest of the world to absorb our capacity.”
This year, Walz has met with Zhao Jian, the Chinese consul general in Chicago, to discuss “China–U.S. relations and sub-national cooperation”—a euphemism for facilitating more Chinese influence in the United States at the state level. In response to Walz’s selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate, China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, wrote that he would bring “sanity” to U.S.–China relations—code for Walz softening America’s stance against Chinese economic aggression.
During his August acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Walz made no mention of the CCP or Chinese aggression.
By contrast, during his July acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Vance made a point to defend the American people and explicitly stand up against communist China and the CCP’s aggression.
Promised Vance: “Together, we will protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.”
If elected, Walz would be the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to have had such extensive dealings with communist China. As vice president, Walz would surely seek to further accommodate the CCP. With the odds of Walz eventually also becoming president at more than 30 percent, that’s a bad bet for anyone concerned about the existential threat the CCP poses.
