How cozy is Tim Walz with China?

The term ‘old friend of the Chinese people’ has a sentimental, almost innocent ring, but the Chinese Communist party (CCP) regards it as a job description. It is a label used to describe foreigners looked on favourably by the CCP, but it also carries obligations. ‘Old friends’ are expected to be sympathetic and further the interests of the party. ‘China will never forget their old friends,’ said President Xi Jinping when he met Henry Kissinger, the most famous holder of that title for his supposed pragmatism toward Beijing, last year.

Perhaps the most notorious ‘old friend’ was Edgar Snow, the American journalist, who was given privileged access to Mao Zedong and his fellow revolutionaries in the 1930s. He rewarded them with flattering portraits. In this respect, the term is not unrelated to ‘useful idiots’, which emerged during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and was used to describe those Westerners who allowed themselves to become dupes of communism.

The question of whether Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, can be regarded as an ‘old friend’ is one of the larger unanswered questions of the US election.