As recently as February, Mr. Walz said on a podcast that he had been in Hong Kong, then a British colony, “on June 4 when Tiananmen happened,” and decided to cross into mainland China to take up his teaching duties even though many people were urging him not to.
But it was not true. Mr. Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, indeed taught at a high school in China as part of a program sending American teachers abroad, but he did not actually travel to the country until August 1989.
Why bother making something like this up?
His “lie” wasn’t even that he was there during Tianamen, it was about where he was when he decided to go to China. Hong Kong was British at the time and no version of his story claims he was in mainland China during Tiananmen.