A lonely young man traveling abroad falls in love with a “China doll” who’s connected to the Communist Party. He thinks the affair is a distant memory. Thirty-five years later, Beijing reminds him that it knows what he did during that hot summer.
What if, decades later, that young man winds up the vice president of the United States?
This sounds like the plot of a cliched spy thriller, but something similar involves Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the Democrats’ No. 2 for the 2024 presidential election. That’s according to the Daily Mail, which has published an exclusive detailing an alleged love affair between Walz and a Chinese lady. A 59-year-old woman calling herself Jenna Wang, Walz’s purported lover, is the source of the story.
Wang said she met Walz in the summer of 1989, when the Nebraskan was in China’s Guangdong Province teaching English in a high school. Wang was teaching English in a nearby middle school. Young love blossomed. Walz complimented Wang on her looks and excellent English. She fell for the midwestern boy: “Tim was very passionate and very romantic. I can still remember dancing with him to our favorite song, ‘Careless Whisper,’” she recalled. Holding hands soon moved to sex, but not sleepovers.
There was a catch. Wang’s father, Bin Hui, was an important official of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, and he did not approve of his daughter sleeping with Westerners. Their affair was, therefore, conducted discreetly. In her account, Walz traveled to Hong Kong and Macau on the weekends, which most Chinese weren’t allowed to do, and brought back Western luxuries such as blue jeans, sunglasses, and even jewelry. “I could tell he was in the military,” Wang said in a revealing quote. Walz was a serving member of the National Guard between 1981 and 2005.
When Walz returned to Nebraska at the end of that passionate summer, the relationship continued, long-distance. Letters flowed back and forth. When Walz returned to China in 1992, Wang believed that he was coming to bring her to a new life in America. She claims she sent Walz a passport photo and personal information for her visa. Wang quit her job because she believed she was headed to Nebraska.
It was not to be. Walz had changed his mind and, she said, asked Wang if she just wanted a U.S. passport. Love fizzled, and Wang asserted that Walz “me made me feel cheap and common, as if I was being treated like a prostitute.” According to her, the lovebirds never met again, although they exchanged friendly messages on Facebook in 2009.
Walz married fellow teacher Gwen Whipple in 1994, on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and pursued a career in politics. He visited China every year, with student exchanges, for more than a decade. Wang left for Europe, where she started a new life. Her CCP boss father died in 1999. Wang told the Daily Mail that she came forward about the affair 35 years later because “Tim lied about Tiananmen Square and he’s lied about other things,” adding, “This is a very crucial moment in history and a man like this does not appear to have the character and integrity to do one of the most important jobs in the world.”
Wang is clearly a woman scorned, but is her account true? She provided the Daily Mail with photos of herself and Walz from the 1989 period, but none of them constitute proof of their relationship. It cannot be ruled out that this is a Chinese intelligence provocation designed to embarrass Walz on the eve of our election, a reminder from Beijing that the CCP knows about Tim’s Chinese adventures.
Young men frequently go abroad and fall for foreign women. Yet, it must be kept in mind that exploiting “China dolls” to entice Western men into espionage is a standard ploy used by Chinese intelligence. In 1989, a rising young American with military connections would have been a tempting target for the Ministry of State Security.
This sounds far-fetched, but it happens regularly, particularly when the MSS is operating on its own soil. Then there’s Walz’s broader problem of not being able to keep his story straight about his ties to Communist China. We know he visited China frequently, for years, but how many times, Walz won’t say. Neither is he explaining who paid for all those junkets.
Then there’s the problem of what Walz told the Defense Department about his Chinese travels. As this column has noted, during his 24 years with the National Guard, Walz surely held security clearances of some kind. Did he report his many trips to China to his unit’s special security officer, as he was required to?
Did he tell the SSO about his affair with Jenna Wang? The DOD requires the holders of security clearances to report “close and continuing contact” with foreign nationals, especially when they involve “ties of affection or obligation.”
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A summer fling followed by three years of long-distance contact certainly meets that standard. Did Walz inform the SSO about his relationship with Wang? That would have set off counterintelligence alarms given her father’s CCP position. Or did Walz fail to mention his Chinese relationships in his security paperwork? That’s a crime.
Either way, we need to know. Walz may be moving into the Oval Office in a few weeks. Beijing seems to know much more about Minnesota’s governor than America’s voters do.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.