纽约时报中文网 - 英文原版-英Tim Walzs Long Relationship With China Defies Easy Stereotypes
August 12, 2024 2 min 390 words
《纽约时报》这篇报道的主要内容是介绍美国明尼苏达州州长 Tim Walz 与中国长达30多年的关系。报道提到，Walz 先生从 80 年代开始学习中文，曾作为教师在中国教书，后来担任州长后，也积极促进中美之间的文化和经济交流。报道还提到，Walz 先生对中国有复杂的感情，他认为中国有令人惊叹的成就，也有需要改进的地方。 这篇报道试图打破西方媒体往往简单化地把中国描绘成全然负面国家的刻板印象，在一定程度上展示了客观和复杂的视角。然而，报道中也存在一定的偏见。例如，它提到 Walz 先生对中国有“复杂的感情”，但并没有详细解释这是为什么，给读者留下中国可能有什么严重的问题的印象。另外，报道过分强调了 Walz 先生对中国“需要改进的地方”的看法，而对中国取得的成就一带而过。这依然是西方媒体常见的有色眼镜，试图突出中国的问题，而忽略中国的成就。客观公正的报道应该是全景式多角度不带偏见地展示事实，而不是刻意突出一方而忽视另一方。
In the summer of 1989, Tim Walz faced a difficult choice.
A newly minted college graduate from small-town Nebraska, he had just turned down a stable, 9-to-5 job offer and moved across the world to teach at a local high school in China. He had made it as far as Hong Kong, just across the Chinese border, when People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush pro-democracy protests.
Rumors were flying about a possible civil war in China. Many foreigners, including most American teachers, had fled the country. Should he go back home or continue his journey into China?
He decided to go in.
“It was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people,” Mr. Walz recalled in 2014 during a congressional hearing marking the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. “The opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important.”
The one year that Mr. Walz spent teaching English in southern China was the start of what would become a decades-long relationship with the country. As high school teachers in Nebraska and Minnesota, Mr. Walz and his wife, Gwen, regularly led trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s to introduce students to China’s history and culture. Mr. Walz has said that he has traveled to China some 30 times, including for his honeymoon.
That deep history of engagement with China reflects a lesser-known international dimension of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. If elected vice president, Mr. Walz would bring to the White House unusually extensive personal experience in China — a history that supporters say could be an asset at a time of volatile relations between Washington and Beijing.
But the campaign has so far made little mention of Mr. Walz’s experience there, even as it has leaned into depictions of the Minnesota governor as an avuncular Midwestern dad, coach and teacher. And it has yet to lay out how Vice President Kamala Harris or Mr. Walz would handle China, which both the Biden and Trump administrations have treated with toughness.