Tim Walz had a secret fling with the daughter of a high-ranking Communist official during his 1989 teaching stint in China, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.
Jenna Wang, 59, claims the VP hopeful showered her with gifts and seduced her at his poky staff accommodation at No. 1 High School in Foshan, Guangdong Province.
The lovers could not risk holding hands or showing affection in public because Wang's dad was a high-ranking figure in the Chinese Communist Party who would disown her for fraternizing with a westerner.
But their romance blossomed behind closed doors as they sipped tea, made love and listened to George Michael hits – leading the then 24-year-old Wang to dream about marriage and a new life in the United States.
No proposal was forthcoming from the future Minnesota governor, however, and the shame of being treated 'like a prostitute' eventually left Wang feeling angry and suicidal, she claims.
'Tim was very passionate and very romantic. I can still remember dancing with him to our favorite song, Careless Whisper,' she told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.
'The fact we couldn't touch or kiss in public just made it all the more exciting and intense when we were finally alone.
'We were deeply in love and I wanted to marry him and start a family. When it didn't happen, I felt very unhappy and sad. Tim's behavior was very selfish.'
Walz's time in China is already a source of controversy after he misleadingly claimed in interviews and congressional transcripts that he was in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square protests erupted from April to June of 1989.
It later transpired that he didn't join the staff of nonprofit WorldTeach in China until August 1989, prompting Walz, 60, to profess during the recent VP debate that he was a 'knucklehead' when recalling dates.
It was several months after he arrived in Foshan that Walz is said to have fallen head over heels for Wang, a pretty, highly educated English language teacher at the nearby No. 8 Middle School.
She was attending one of his lectures to brush up on her pronunciation when the then-25-year-old Walz slipped her headphones aside and whispered into her ear: 'You are very beautiful.'
'Tim was very handsome. I loved his eyes and his big mouth. We talked afterwards and he was very complimentary about my English,' Wang told DailyMail.com.
'My colleagues couldn't speak whole sentences but Tim told me that if he closed his eyes and listened it was like being back in America.'
Wang had a friend on the same teaching staff as Walz so she was able to gain access to the exclusive school where she could visit him in his one-bed staff digs.
Over the weeks that followed the lovebirds grew closer, walking in the park and going to dances in the evening where there was less chance of being spotted by communist snoops.
They avoided overt shows of affection in case it got back to Wang's father Bin Hui, who was an important CCP official and chairman of a labor union in her native city of Guilin.
Walz would travel to Hong Kong and Macau on the weekends – cities that were more or less inaccessible for all but the Chinese elite – and bring back Western-style luxuries like blue jeans, Ray-Ban sunglasses and jewelry.
'He couldn't sing and when he tried to dance he found it very hard. I could tell he was in the military,' Wang said.
'But we talked for hours and hours, we stayed in bed, we had sex. He continued to buy me gifts.
'I could never stay overnight because of the social conventions. It was very repressive. Couples walked around the city like robots.
'My father would have been very, very angry and sad if he had found out.'
During the summer Walz returned to the US but wrote letters to Wang, giving vivid depictions of his life and teaching job in Alliance, Nebraska.
At Walz's direction, Wang says she sent off a passport photo and information about herself to an address in the States, believing it was part of the process to secure her a visa.
When the future running mate of presidential hopeful Kamala Harris flew back to China in 1992, she resigned her coveted teaching role, believing she was about to embark on a new life.
Their relationship soon began to sour, however, when Walz made clumsy, romantic gestures in public, on one occasion trying to feed Wang a slice of pear as they embarked on a ten-day tour of South China.
'People were staring at us. I tried to reject it because I was very afraid. Teachers were supposed to set an example,' she said.
The couple made sure to book two hotel rooms wherever they stayed but on an overnight train journey Walz insisted that Wang sleep in his cabin.
The conductor shone a flashlight on Wang in the middle of the night and started to admonish her, only to retreat when Walz, afforded more respect as a westerner, woke up.
When the pair reached Hainan Island, known for its tropical climate and beach resorts, Wang was ready to confront him about their future plans.
Walz responded by suggesting that Wang was more interested in a US passport than marriage.
'This was very offensive. I said to him that it is both or nothing,' she said.
'I wasn't giving up my life and my position to move to Nebraska, a cold place in the middle of nowhere that most Chinese people had never heard of.
'I was giving it up to be with Tim, to get married and start a family.
'Knowing now that he wasn't going to marry me made me feel cheap and common, as if I was being treated like a prostitute.'
The next morning Wang slipped out of their hotel and took a taxi to a remote clifftop where she says she contemplated throwing herself off rather than returning to her old life in disgrace.
But on the bus back to Foshan she resolved to leave Walz and instead headed to Guilin to help her mother recover from a recent stomach surgery.
'The bus stopped but I didn't get off. He said, please come and let's talk, let's give this a chance,' Wang recalled.
'But I said no, I felt dead inside. I wasn't going to force a person to love me. I never saw Tim again.'
From 1993 onward, Walz began leading annual summer trips to China for students in the Nebraska and Minnesota high schools where he taught.
He married Gwen Whipple, also a teacher, in 1994.
Walz never again crossed paths with Wang, who emigrated to Europe several years later where she now works as teacher, translator and cultural mediator.
She says the pair last exchanged a handful of friendly messages over Facebook in 2009 and talked about how their lives had panned out.
The mother-of-one says she is coming forward now because she feels Walz behaved selfishly towards her and put her reputation and career at risk with his fickle behavior.
'Tim lied about Tiananmen Square and he's lied about other things,' she told DailyMail.com
'This is a very crucial moment in history and a man like this does not appear to have the character and integrity to do one of the most important jobs in the world.'
A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz 2024 campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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