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?
So the civil unrest that was caused by the massacre continued for a very long time. the CCP still censors and bans refrences to the event today, and if you talk about it, you go to jail. It’s very likely there was unrest on the mainland when he was there, and even after, there would still be warnings about unrest from hong kong residence (Probably in exactly the same way My grandmother still warns me about going into ‘that wasteland, Minneapolis’. Even though I’ve sent her the photos of a vibrant city center that’s absolutely not a waste land.)