Tim Walz Said He Was in Hong Kong in 1989 During Tiananmen. Not True.

Tim Walz Said He Was in Hong Kong in 1989 During Tiananmen. Not True.

Mr. Walz taught at a high school in China as part of a program sending American teachers abroad, but he did not actually travel to the country until August 1989.

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By Danny Hakim and Amy Qin

Repeatedly over the years, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has said that the year he spent teaching in China began with a trip to Hong Kong during the pro-democracy protests in the spring of 1989 that culminated in the deadly crackdown that June in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

As recently as February, Mr. Walz said on a podcast that he had been in Hong Kong, then a British colony, “on June 4 when Tiananmen happened,” and decided to cross into mainland China to take up his teaching duties even though many people were urging him not to.

Mr. Walz had told the same story a decade earlier, at a congressional hearing, when he testified that he “was in Hong Kong in May 1989,” adding, “As the events were unfolding, several of us went in. I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.”

But it was not true. Mr. Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, indeed taught at a high school in China as part of a program sending American teachers abroad, but he did not actually travel to the country until August 1989.

Contemporaneous news reports in Nebraska indicated that Mr. Walz was still in his home state during the spring and did not leave for China until August. And his campaign said on Tuesday that it did not dispute those accounts.

Mr. Walz’s version of events, which he related as a member of Congress in 2014 and has been repeated by his campaign staff and reported by The New York Times and other news organizations, put him close to the scene of one of the most dramatic episodes in modern history.

While the political climate in China was still turbulent and uncertain by that August, it was in the spring of 1989 that students protested for democratic reforms, until a military crackdown on June 3 and 4 — in which protesters, soldiers and bystanders were killed — reverberated around the world.

Mr. Walz has suggested he showed courage in following through on his plans to enter China to teach, when others in the same program backed out. August still was a fraught and chaotic time to enter the country.

“Quite a few of our folks decided not to go in,” Mr. Walz said in February on “Pod Save America.”

“My thinking at the time was, what a golden opportunity to go tell, you know, how it was,” he continued. “And I did have a lot of freedom to do that. Taught American history and could tell the story.”

Mr. Walz also said he was in Hong Kong “on June 4, 1989,” during a radio interview in 2019, and during a 2009 hearing of a Congressional-Executive Commission on China that commemorated the Tiananmen Square protests, CNN reported on Tuesday.

Asked for an explanation of why Mr. Walz had repeatedly described himself as having left Nebraska months earlier than he actually had, his campaign offered none.

The timing of Mr. Walz’s initial journey to China was first questioned on Monday by Minnesota Public Radio. Mr. Walz graduated in May 1989 from Chadron State College in Chadron, Neb. Among other things, a small article in The Chadron Record on Aug. 11 of that year said Mr. Walz was leaving that Sunday to teach in China.

The Harris-Walz campaign did not offer any official comment for this article on Tuesday, beyond saying it would not dispute that Mr. Walz had spoken erroneously about the timing. Mr. Walz was preparing for his appearance in New York at a debate Tuesday night against Senator JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president.

Mr. Walz has also said that he traveled to China about 30 times — as a teacher, he took students on a number of trips to the country — but his campaign this week put the number of trips from the United States to China at closer to 15.

Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris chose Mr. Walz as her running mate in August, the campaign sent a summary of Mr. Walz’s experience in China in response to questions from a Times reporter. Asked when exactly in 1989 Mr. Walz arrived in China, a campaign spokesman said that “Governor Walz arrived in Hong Kong in late spring, was in Hong Kong during protests and, instead of leaving, went into China to do his teaching job.”

The campaign also referred to several interviews and articles in which Mr. Walz had described his experience in China. The links included the February interview with the “Pod Save America” podcast.

While falsehoods have long been a staple of speeches by the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, his campaign has seized on inaccuracies that have surfaced in Mr. Walz’s past remarks. Mr. Walz has faced intense scrutiny over his service in the National Guard, in particular a remark that he made in 2018 saying that he had “carried a weapon of war in war.” Mr. Walz did not serve in combat, and the Harris campaign has said that he misspoke.

Republicans have also attacked Mr. Walz for making misleading statements about the infertility treatment he and his wife used. Mr. Walz has said that his family used in vitro fertilization to start a family. But the Harris-Walz campaign recently clarified that the couple had not relied on I.V.F. but rather on another common fertility procedure called intrauterine insemination, or I.U.I.

Mr. Walz has also given different versions of the story of his drunken driving arrest in 1995. In 2006, during his first run for Congress, his campaign blamed the partial hearing loss he had sustained while serving in a field artillery unit for what he called a miscommunication with the state trooper who pulled him over.

When the issue came up again during his run for governor in 2018, Mr. Walz acknowledged the sobriety issue and said he had been watching college football on the evening he was arrested. In 2022, a news outlet in Minnesota obtained a transcript of his plea hearing from March 1996, showing that Mr. Walz had a blood alcohol level of 0.128, well over Nebraska’s legal limit of 0.1 at the time. Mr. Walz now says he no longer drinks alcohol.

While China in later years became a popular destination for many young, ambitious Americans looking to study and work abroad — Usha Vance, Mr. Vance’s wife, also did a brief teaching fellowship in southern China in the 2000s — it was hardly a hot spot when Mr. Walz first arrived.

At the time, China was still opening up after several decades of turbulence under Chairman Mao Zedong when student-led protests in Beijing evolved into a passionate movement to protest official corruption and call for democracy.

Overnight on June 3, 1989, Chinese soldiers cracked down, killing hundreds — some say thousands — of protesters and bystanders in Beijing, and setting off bloody confrontations in other Chinese cities. Countless demonstrators were imprisoned, while others, including many foreigners who had not participated in the protests, fled the country.

For several years afterward, China faced international condemnation as well as economic sanctions and political isolation.