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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.

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.

Why bother making something like this up?

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    22·
    2 months ago

    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.

    That doesn’t sound like certainty to me. So how strong are those indications?
    Maybe Walz remembers it wrong, the incident would still be very recent, and the warning sincere about not going to mainland.
    But it could also be he remembers correctly, and the “indications” are wrong.

    No matter which, it doesn’t really matter if it was 2 months later or not. It was definitely at around that time.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      That doesn’t sound like certainty to me. So how strong are those indications? Maybe Walz remembers it wrong, the incident would still be very recent, and the warning sincere about not going to mainland. But it could also be he remembers correctly, and the “indications” are wrong.

      So the civil unrest that was caused by the massacre continued for a very long time. the CCP still censors and bans refrences to the event today, and if you talk about it, you go to jail. It’s very likely there was unrest on the mainland when he was there, and even after, there would still be warnings about unrest from hong kong residence (Probably in exactly the same way My grandmother still warns me about going into ‘that wasteland, Minneapolis’. Even though I’ve sent her the photos of a vibrant city center that’s absolutely not a waste land.)