Tim Walz says he ‘misspoke’ about being in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square protests

Politics

At the vice presidential debate, Walz tried to dismiss a previous misstatement as insignificant and said he could be “a knucklehead at times.”

By Kellen Browning, New York Times Service

updated on October 2, 2024

Asked by a debate moderator on Tuesday why Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota had said that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, when he had in reality been in his home state of Nebraska, Walz said he was “a knucklehead at times.”

“All I said on this was, I got there that summer, and misspoke on this,” Walz added, when pressed to explain why he has maintained, for years, that he was in Hong Kong during the anti-government demonstration and entered China shortly afterward.

Walz tried to dismiss the misstatement as insignificant, saying he sometimes gets “caught up in the rhetoric.” He then pivoted to assert that his work as a teacher, congressman and governor was evidence that his community trusted his record despite his missteps.

Walz has long said that he was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, the day that Chinese soldiers killed hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen Square. He has said that he entered mainland China shortly after, even as others chose not to travel there, because he wanted to forge ahead with his yearlong teaching stint in the country — framing it as a courageous act.

“My thinking at the time was, what a golden opportunity to go tell, you know, how it was,” Walz told the podcast “Pod Save America” in February. “And I did have a lot of freedom to do that. Taught American history and could tell the story.”

But Walz was not in Hong Kong. He was in Nebraska until that August, according to news reports from the time. The timeline of his trip was first questioned by Minnesota Public Radio on Monday. His campaign did not provide an explanation.

Even as he acknowledged the misstatements at Tuesday’s debate, Walz again appeared to muddle the timeline: “I was in Hong Kong and China, during the democracy protests, went in. And from that I learned a lot about what needed to be in governance.”

There were rallies in Hong Kong to support the pro-democracy protesters in China, even after the military crackdown. But Walz appears to have arrived after the large protests in the People’s Republic that people commonly think of as the pro-democracy protests.

Republicans have pounced on the issue, pointing to it as another of a series of exaggerations and misstatements Walz has made, both large and small, that have surfaced since he was named Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate.

Those include a comment he made in 2018 about “weapons of war that I carried in war” as a member of the National Guard, when he never served in combat. He has also implied that he and his wife used in vitro fertilization to start their family. In fact, the couple used a different treatment, intrauterine insemination.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.