Tim Walz claimed to be in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square massacre—he was in Nebraska

Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has previously claimed that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre, however, that has turned out not to be true. Walz, the Washington Free Beacon reported, was in fact home in Nebraska at the time.

According to Beacon, Walz's claim made during a 2014 congressional hearing was false. In that hearing, he spoke about the Tiananmen Square massacre, saying "I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May of ‘89." He went on to say that "And as the events were unfolding, several of us went in. And I still remember the train station in Hong Kong."



Walz continued, saying "There was a large number of, especially European, I think, very angry that we would still go after what had happened, but it was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels."

He continued, saying that he was able to teach in Hong Kong throughout the summertime, adding, "The opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important, and it was a very interesting summer to say the least." Walz added that he remembered the “news blackouts" that occurred in the country after the massacre as well as when the Berlin Wall fell later in November.

The Tiananmen Square massacre took place on June 4, 1989. It was a reaction to student protests in China that began in April of that year and went into June 1989, when they were stopped by brutal force of the communist regime.

Contemporaneous reports during May 1989 place Walz back in the United States. A picture of Walz showed him in a National Guard storage room in Alliance, Nebraska dated May 16, 1989. According to the reports at the time, Walz did not leave the US until August of that year.

The discrepancy in Walz's testimony with the timeline of when he traveled to Hong Kong was first reported by when Minnesota Public Radio asked the Walz campaign to produce documentation of his travels that year in Asia. However, the campaign "was unable to produce documentation to back up Walz’s statement that he was there during the uprising.”

The discrepancy is one of the latest revealed examples of Walz inflating his experience and resume as a politician over the course his career as he has been held up to greater scrutiny being on the Democrat ticket for vice president. Other falsehoods that he has spread include that he retired as a Command Sergeant Major as well as that he carried “weapons in war" when he never served in a combat zone.