Does Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s long-standing love affair with China let him critique its government’s mistreatment of its people — yet facilitate its mistreatment of ours?

Since Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, picked Walz as her running mate, his relationship with the self-dubbed “Middle Kingdom” has come under fevered, febrile, even fervid scrutiny.

“Communist China is very happy with @GovTimWalz as Kamala’s VP pick,” opined Richard Grennell, a former Trump acting director of national intelligence, for instance. “No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz.”

According to up-and-coming Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), “Tim Walz owes the American people an explanation about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China.”

“[A] young American with an affection for China, who was also a part-time member of the U.S. military, would have been a tempting recruiting target for Chinese intelligence,” a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer noted.

“Walz is dangerous,” warned James Hutton, the talented former Trump VA official. The Minnesota governor “will have to learn the truth of the vicious nature of the dictatorship in Beijing. Communist tyranny may not be a bad thing to Walz but the rest of the world knows.”

What are the facts?

First, Walz indeed went to China to teach right after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Returning, he gushed, “No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again. They gave me more gifts than I could bring home.”

He claimed, “There was no anti-American feeling whatsoever,” though he advised students he subsequently took to China to downplay their “American-ness.”

Walz liked that the totalitarian state had “almost no crime.”

He got married on Tiananmen’s anniversary because he wouldn’t forget the date then honeymooned in China.

Walz now disagrees that “China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship” for America — the Chinese foreign minister says we are hurtling toward inevitable “confrontation and conflict” unless America blinks.

So Walz’s China ties are, in a word, weird.

That said, Walz admitted Tiananmen “will always have a lot of bitter memories for the people,” and “remembered waking up and seeing the news on June Fourth that the unthinkable had happened.” He also acknowledged that the Chinese government had cheated and mistreated its people. He criticized the Chinese Communist Party on human rights, meeting with dissidents and working on bills critical of Beijing on the treatment of its people and subjugated lands. In 2016, he acknowledged that he wanted U.S. trade with China, but with green, fair trade and human rights agreements.

Yet Walz’s criticisms might seem “big help with a little badmouth,” a recognized CCP tactic. The author of Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, explains, “Beijing pragmatically accepts some level of public criticism from the elites with whom it is working [if they] deliver on key policies and actions that benefit the regime.”

For instance?

First, Walz took money from the Chinese government to help sway Americans.

He and his wife founded a company that took American students to China, something he acknowledged the Chinese government underwrote.

The Walzs’ program lasted until 2003, and recently, the governor estimated that he had made more than 30 trips to the country.

He admitted he was a trendsetter in bringing American students there on the Chinese government’s dime to learn about the Chinese government.

Second, Walz supported Minnesota’s sanctuary state status for illegal immigrants, part of the web of pro-illegal immigrant policies that have recently made Chinese expats become the fastest growing group crossing our Southern border illegally, from 342 to 30,000 during the Biden-Harris Administration — up 8,671%.

Even if many of these border-jumpers legitimately fled China to escape COVID-19 crackdowns and totalitarian tyranny, critics charge this “massive surge in Chinese nationals … very likely” includes inserting “military personnel,” because many are “military-age men” with “known ties” to the CCP the Chinese military. “If you’re a bad guy that wants to infiltrate operatives into the U.S.A., the southern border is a pretty easy way to do it,” an independent national security analyst agreed. Finally, before this surge even started, a staggering 5.4 million Chinese nationals had already accumulated in America.

What is Walz doing in Minnesota about a Chinese presence in America roughly twice the size of the U.S. military? Big help with a little badmouth.

Third, Walz’s China ties also raise questions about flouting the flagrant flow of fentanyl murdering Americans. China’s role now consists largely of supplying cartels with raw materials for fentanyl, which those cartels produce and smuggle in. The result: Drug overdose deaths during the Biden-Harris administration approximates America’s body count in World War II.

This crisis requires more than complaining about human rights in Tibet. It requires staring down China over its feeder chemical supply operation and using possible military levels of force against China’s cross-border cartel customers. Those such as Walz, who “totally disagree” that our relationship with China needs to be adversarial, may have more malleable intentions toward the Middle Kingdom.

Finally, take COVID-19 reparations. We now know Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior CCP officials discussed the coronavirus at a Jan. 7, 2020, politburo meeting, proving he knew early on about the possible pandemic.

Once “Xi’s disease” began to take its toll, President Donald Trump explicitly charged that China “let it spread” — asking why the CCP curtailed travel into China and within China, but allowed flights to continue to America and the rest of the world.

Today, COVID-19 deaths have soared past 7 million, and crazed COVID-19 crackdowns modeled on China’s cost the United States alone upwards of $14 trillion. Should Xi and his regime pay nothing for loss on that scale?

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It’s a question unlikely to occur to a vice president who, no matter how long he lives, will never be treated as well again as he was in China — especially one who, as governor, cracked down on COVID-19 so crazily that he set up a Soviet-style snitch line.

As outstandingly outspoken as Walz has been on CCP human rights violations, taking the Chinese threat seriously may require someone who hasn’t received more Chinese gifts than he could bring home.

Christopher C. Hull, Ph.D., is president of Issue Management, a public affairs firm that does grassroots and advocacy work including on national security. He was previously chief of staff to a member of the House of Representatives.