The tenuous Macao connections of US Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz have been seized on by opponents seeking to portray him as soft on Washington’s chief geopolitical rival China.
Walz, who once ran an education tour company offering summers in China to American students, was reportedly a visiting fellow at Macao Polytechnic University (MPU) in 2007. He also taught at a high school in China for a year in the 1980s, through a Harvard University programme, and has visited the country about 30 times.
These links have now been seized on by his Republican Party enemies, who have launched a probe into what they say is evidence of “long-standing connections to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entities and officials.”
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James Comer, chair of the US House Oversight committee, characterised MPU as an institution that has “devotion to the CCP.”
Conservative US media has also taken up the cudgel. The tabloid New York Post described MPU as a “CCP-sanctioned” institution and said that the school’s backing of the Belt and Road Initiative was evidence of its support for “Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s aggressive pursuit of influence overseas.”
According to its website, MPU was founded in 1981, and was formerly known as the University of East Asia Polytechnic Institute. It became the Macao Polytechnic Institute in 1991 and Macao Polytechnic University in 2022. It is currently ranked 287 in the Eastern Asia university rankings compiled by QS Top Universities.
