'Elite Capture,' Tim Walz and How I Met Deng Xiaoping

Really!

It must have been somewhere in February 1979 I met Deng Xiaoping—arguably the most consequential (for good and, sadly, ill) Chinese leader since Mao Zedong and at that point capo di tutti capi of the world‘s most populous nation—in a small, musty union hall near downtown Los Angeles. He was accompanied by the Osmonds, of all people, as he had been for much of his tour of the U. S., who performed a schmalzy song-and-dance number for an audience of perhaps three dozen aging left-wing political activists.

If that sounds surreal, let me tell you, it was--the diminutive Deng, all of 5’ 2,” bouncing along to Donny and company.  Before, he had dutifully shaken everyone’s hand, including mine, like a politician on a rope line.

I was invited because I had joined an organization called the U.S.-China Friendship Association.  I wasn’t so naïve, even then, not to realize it was a front of some sort, but I went along because it was the only path I knew to get on one of those rare early tours of the People’s Republic of China.

As it happens, I did.  That summer I spent about a month on an “activist’s tour” of the PRC—no, Jane Fonda wasn’t on it—that I used for the background of my third Moses Wine detective novel, “Peking Duck.”

We covered a lot of the country, from Guangzhou to Manchuria. The Chinese people were still in Mao suits and our group were regarded as curiosities, followed down the street, sometimes by hundreds, the only Caucasians many of the locals had ever seen. The only non-Chinese we encountered the whole trip was an Ethiopian volleyball team that seemed mysteriously to turn up at every stop—the Great Wall and even a ball-bearing factory—where our omnipresent guide/interpreters led us. Such was the managed nature of communist tourism in those days.  Now tracking is a simpler matter.

You could call me something of an early target of what has come to be known as “elite capture,” which I will come to later, but first back to Deng.

In 1979 he was something of a hero, the man who had famously opined “I don’t care if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

To many that meant—as it did temporarily for Lenin’s New Economic Policy—that the market could function under communism.  Things were loosening up.  President Jimmy Carter welcomed him.  He made the cover of Time Magazine.  “Moving away from Marx,” it said. He was, in a sense, revolutionary.

Even today, his policies are, more or less, in effect.  You can enrich yourself through the market in China as easily, or almost as easily, as anywhere.  Peking—now, as we know, Beijing--is chock-a-block with billionaires.

But there is a catch, a huge one.  You have to be a member of the CCP, a Party man or woman, to play.  Otherwise do not apply.  Go to the back of the line, if you’re lucky. If you’re not…

Well… back to Deng again. After a growing dissatisfaction with their totalitarian system during the Eighties, coupled with an envy of the freedoms of the West, a significant democracy movement was developing in the People’s Republic.

The regime did not take this lightly, to say the least.

Almost exactly ten years after my China tour came the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.  Here, compared to some others, is a rather restrained description from history.state.gov:

“On the night of June 3 and 4, the People’s Liberation Army stormed the Square with tanks, crushing the protests with terrible human costs. Estimates of the numbers killed vary. The Chinese Government has asserted that injuries exceeded 3,000 and that over 200 individuals, including 36 university students, were killed that night. Western sources, however, are skeptical of the official Chinese report and most frequently cite the toll as hundreds or even thousands killed. Similar protests that had taken place in other Chinese cities were soon suppressed and their leaders imprisoned.”

The man in charge of this, the man who pulled the many triggers, was the “reformer” Deng Xiaoping.  So much for black and white cats.

After the massacre, many Americans who were teaching or working in the PRC fled the despotic country.

Not so Tim Walz, currently running for vice president as a Democrat,  who went the other way.

That same year, 1989, the young Walz moved to China to teach.  But that was only the start.  He has traveled to the communist state at least as many as thirty times since, by his own admission. The Chinese feted him, lavishing him, he has also stated, with gifts. He and his wife even had their honeymoon there, not á deux but in the company of a group of young American students they brought along.  (At least Bernie Sanders and his wife were alone on their Soviet honeymoon.)

The Walzes  deliberately celebrated their nuptials on 6/4, the very day of the Tiananmen Massacre, so, according to his wife, they would never forget the date. This is the same woman who, during the burning of Minneapolis after the George Floyd affair, kept the window open at the governor’s mansion to enjoy inhaling fumes from the destruction of her own city that her husband was loath to do anything about.

On many of those thirty or more voyages to China, Walz was accompanied by or was arranging trips for many young American students, largely at Chinese expense, to the communist nation through his company Education Travel Adventures, Inc.  He admonished those students not to act too American.   

In other words, wittingly or not, he was sending our kids to China to be indoctrinated.  Of course, he would say otherwise.  And his loyal defenders at the mainstream media are, needless to say, bending over backwards to cover for him.  They point, absurdly and meretriciously, to Walz’s human rights record, that he met with the Dalai Lama and opposed the oppression of the Falun Gong by the CCP and so forth.

I wrote “absurdly and meretriciously” because this is either an outright media lie or incredibly naïve or both.  The Chinese frequently prefer for their dupes/agents/whatever, accidental or deliberate, to offer a modicum of criticism of their regime so that they have credibility in the U. S. and the West. It gives them the cover they need. The CCP’s intelligence apparatus understands us well.  (If you would like to learn more about how this works from a similar KGB perspective, I recommend “Disinformation” by Ion Pacepa, the highest East Bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West.)

This all comes under the heading of “elite capture” that has been a CCP strategy for decades at all leadership levels of our society.  They work to co-opt our “elites” in all areas, business, scientific and political with a particular emphasis on our colleges and universities.  They do a good job of exploiting our greed, as in case of the now-former Harvard Professor Charles Lieber.  From University World News:

“Lieber also concealed his income from the Chinese program on his US tax returns, including US$50,000 a month for 12 months from the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT), China, some of which was paid to him in US$100 bills in brown paper packaging, according to prosecutors.”

(According to Wikipedia, Lieber had been named the leading chemist in the world for the decade 2000-2010 by Thomson Reuters.  That’s some “elite capture.”)

Whether Tim Walz is a communist or what used to be called a “communist dupe” is moot.  Whether he was actually a spy is also moot, although Chinese espionage is common in the U. S., most notoriously in the case of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s chauffeur (for twenty years)  and the adulterous activities of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif) whose paramour, one “Christine Fang,” has mysteriously disappeared from our country.   (And yet the clueless congressman is still in office—go figure.) And then, of course, there have been police stations operated by the CCP discovered functioning in our Chinatowns, not to mention who knows how many agents infiltrating our country via the open border.  Record numbers of Chinese men of military age have been reported crossing the Southern border this year, many described to be uniformly dressed in white shirts and black pants.

None of this is likely to concern Tim Walz much.  He made his bed with the CCP years ago, as John Schindler explains well here.  Formal agent or not, Walz certainly helped the Chinese regime and they in turn helped him.  He was and is a textbook case in “elite capture,” just as, many of us now assume, Joe Biden was, even though it is questionable whether its extent will ever be exposed.  (“Anonymous” Chinese donors financed the Penn Biden Center to the tune of something close to $60 million.  Ever wonder why?  And then there’s the testimony of Tony Bobulinski that has never been substantively contested.)

There are plenty of reasons to despise Tim Walz—a man who never met a left-wing cause he didn’t like, including allowing young children to undertake transgender treatments without the knowledge of their parents, not to mention supporting tampons in boys’ rooms—but this bizarre love affair with China might be his greatest danger going forward.

I remember the beginnings of that love affair, having witnessed it in my own life. It must have been circa 1970 that as very young man I was in Santa Monica for a performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.   They asked us all to form a conga line and, to musical accompaniment, led us in singing, in the rhythmic rock style of the day, “Oom-Papa-Mao-Papa-Mao-Zedong.”

And so it went.  On and on, our radical/adolescent version of the Ronettes or the Shirelles.  We thought we were just so cool and rebellious. Mao was trendy then, like Ché Guevara.  Few of us knew that we were singing the praises of history’s greatest mass murderer with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims due to starvation, persecution, prison labor and mass executions.  The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution even seemed like a clever idea for how to de-class, not a dunce-hatted, totalitarian scheme designed to distract from the incalculable starvations of the Great Leap Forward.  It only made matters worse, with ricochets to this day.

Eventually, some, alas not all, of us learned.

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