(Bloomberg) -- A towering fence and a recently installed giant gateway now all but obscure the school where Tim Walz spent a year teaching English on the cusp of China’s economic boom.
Today, facial recognition cameras are installed at the entrance to the sprawling complex that has doubled in size since the fresh college graduate from Nebraska arrived three and a half decades ago. And journalists asking questions without prior approval are certainly not permitted.
A security guard outside Foshan No. 1 High School turned away Bloomberg News reporters who sought to inquire about Kamala Harris’s presidential running mate. One of his colleagues said all interview requests with teachers, students or the school’s head need to be approved by the regional Foreign Ministry office and Education Bureau. A local Foreign Ministry official, however, said reporters didn’t need to seek approval. The local Education Bureau couldn’t be reached by phone, and calls to Foshan No. 1’s listed telephone numbers went unanswered.
That walled-off environment is emblematic of how President Xi Jinping’s tighter control of society is making it harder for foreigners to access the world’s No. 2 economy. While for decades after the Cold War, people exchanges between China and America flowed freely through study, tourism and business, such interactions have diminished as tensions between the world’s largest economies fray.
The number of American students in China has fallen to 900 from 15,000 a decade ago, and the Fulbright program that once brought US scholars to the Asian nation was terminated in 2020. Xi last year called for 50,000 young Americans to visit his country, but such outreach so far has been scripted, in stark contrast to the spontaneous exchanges Walz has described.
As relations with Washington have deteriorated over trade spats and Beijing’s increased military aggression toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea, the US has moved to stop sending Peace Corps volunteers to China after nearly 30 years. Beijing has strengthened its Great Firewall to stop foreign ideas on sensitive issues penetrating China’s internet.
Walz came to Foshan soon after the deadly Tiananmen military crackdown in 1989, when the Chinese government was trying to further open the coastal province of Guangdong and turbocharge its export-oriented economy. Local cadres were also seeking to expand cultural exchanges, according to an archive maintained by a provincial research institute.
Part of the first wave of foreign teachers flocking to China during the opening up era, the now Minnesota governor landed at a school established by the British Methodist Church in 1913. The facility was taken over by the government shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
During his stint teaching English and American history to some 65 students, Walz lived in staff accommodation without air conditioning despite heat that reached 100F (38C), according to a Nebraskan newspaper report. China’s unstable electricity supply meant that turning on the unit would dim lights in the whole building.
“There was no anti-American feeling whatsoever,” Walz told the Star Herald in September 1990. “America is ‘It’ in the eyes of the Chinese. Many of the students want to come to America.”
Walz made six trips to nearby Macau where he could eat McDonald’s and watch English-language movies during his time on the WorldTeach program, which was founded by Harvard University graduates and no longer operates in China.
He also made a 40-hour train trip to Beijing, where he visited Tiananmen Square. “It will always have a lot of bitter memories for the people,” he said.
Foshan No. 1 was the highest-ranked school in the city at the time of Walz’s visit, according to a former student who attended from 1994 to 2000 and asked to be identified only by her English name, Eliz, because she’s not authorized to speak on behalf of the school. Back then, it was common for top middle schools in Guangdong to have foreign instructors, who helped students with their language skills, she said.
Students could make private appointments with teachers to practice speaking English, she added, noting Guangdong stood out in the 1990s as more open than inland provinces where foreign teachers were still rare.
An English teacher who worked at the school when Walz was there told a Chinese news site that “the relationship was very cordial between Chinese and foreign colleagues.” Walz was “very friendly with the students, always laughing, mingled really well with teachers and students.”
China doesn’t regularly publish the number of foreign teachers in the country, but the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs put the figure at 1 million in 2019, according to media reports. That number has likely since fallen, a casualty of both strict Covid-19 restrictions that kept foreigners out and Beijing’s crackdown on the tutoring industry.
The US has also issued an advisory urging its citizens to “reconsider travel” to China, citing Beijing’s “arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans and the risk of wrongful detentions.”
Experience of living and working in China can help break stereotypes, said Wu Xinbo, director at Fudan University’s Center for American Studies, who is hosting a group of Harvard students this summer.
“It is a concern that future US policymakers are missing China experience,” he said. “It is a hindrance toward a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of China, and also knowing how to best interact with China.”
Walz picked up some Chinese during his time in Foshan and later set up a business with his wife organizing summer trips to the Asian nation. The future vice presidential candidate even got married on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings so he’d “have a date he’ll always remember,” according to his wife.
As his political career took off in Congress, Walz co-sponsored legislation including the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2017 and resolutions expressing concern about the treatment of Falun Gong group that is banned in China.
Former Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Jeffrey Ngo met with Walz in 2016 at an event along with now-disbanded political group Demosisto.
Walz is “able to make a difference between the Chinese people and the government,” said Ngo, who is now senior policy and research fellow at Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council. “That personal experience being in China and also seeing up close the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government offers him a more nuanced take.”
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
