Newly minted Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a former congressman and current Minnesota governor little-known on the national stage, will bring deep experience with China issues to the ticket below Vice President Kamala Harris.

Although the White House race against former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and his VP pick, Sen. J.D. Vance, has largely focused on domestic issues, China is certain to remain the United States’ top strategic priority no matter who wins on Nov. 5.

If voters deliver Harris to the White House, she would have in Walz a rare deputy who has relatively extensive knowledge of the Asian economic and military powerhouse — with George H.W. Bush, a former U.S. envoy to Beijing in the mid-1970s, the last person on a presidential ticket to have actually lived in China.

Walz’s experiences with the country began in 1989, around the time of Beijing’s infamous Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, when he taught English in China’s southern Guangdong province for about one year.

“China was coming, and that’s the reason that I went,” Walz told The Hill in 2007.

In a symbol of how much the experience resonated with him, Walz, by then a full-time teacher, married his wife, Gwen, on the fifth anniversary of the crackdown, honeymooning and touring the country with students during the same period and later establishing a summer exchange program that took dozens of students to China nearly every summer through 2003.

“He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” his then-bride told a local paper ahead of the wedding.

Although this interest in China was largely personal, it also became a policy issue with his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006.

During his 12 years in Congress, he cosponsored legislation that ultimately set the stage for sanctions on Chinese mainland and Hong Kong officials over their crackdown on the city’s pro-democracy movement. He also had a hand in a large number of resolutions singling Beijing out for alleged human rights abuses, including one on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown that called for an investigation into the treatment of imprisoned protesters.

Walz also served on the human rights-focused Congressional-Executive Commission on China for 11 years, where he was a strong advocate for religious freedom in Tibet — he also had a “life-changing lunch” with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader — and repeatedly expressed concern over Beijing’s treatment of prominent legal advocates such as Chen Guangcheng.

While both Democrats and Republicans have seen their stances on China harden, Walz’s remarks years ago as congressman — many of which were making the rounds on social media after Tuesday’s announcement — highlighted an evolution in views toward Beijing seen in many policymakers in the United States. Many, including former President Bill Clinton, had pinned their hopes that an economic opening of China would help promote political freedoms and ultimately democratize the country.

"I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” Walz said in a video from 2016 that had been reposted on the X platform. "I totally disagree, and I think we need to stand firm on what they’re doing in the South China Sea. But there’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”

But these views — while likely to be criticized by China hawks in the Republican Party, including Trump — still fall largely in line with the China policy of President Joe Biden, whose administration has by and large focused on an approach that has been “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be.”

In the end, though, a potential Vice President Walz would be expected to offer Harris a nuanced view of the U.S. rival — and the growing possibilities of a new Cold War — should the two be elected.

Speaking in the same 2016 interview, Walz signaled that forming policy toward the nation of 1.4 billion people would require a keen and discerning eye.

“If someone tells you they’re an expert on China, they're probably not telling you the truth, because it's a complex country, but it's critically important for us.”