James Lilley’s life has been entwined with China’s fate since 1917, when his father started selling kerosene for Standard Oil along the Yangzi river.Lilley spent his childhood in China, much of it in Tsingtao, a bursting,Westernized port city. Days were filled with trips to the beach and trailing around older brother Frank, who became a mentor to young Jim. When world War 2 forced Lilley family to leave China, the die was already cast for a maturing jim. a professor at Yale took him aside and suggested a career in intellegence, a decision that meant a lifetime of returning to the country of his birth.China Hands, written in Lilley’s voice with the assistance of his journalist son Jeffrey, is a memoir of that exceptional life.
Lilley served for nearly thirty years in the CIA in Tokyo,Taiwan,Hongkong,Laos, Bangkok, Cambodia,and Peking before moving to the state Department in the early 1980s to begin a distingulishded diplomatic career. From covert operations during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to participating in Richard Nixon’s opening to China as the CIA’s first station chief in Peking,Lilley rose up through the ranks of CIA to become the country’s leading intellegence officer on China. Then, as the United States’s top diplomat in Taiwan and South Korea while those countries became “true” democracies in the 1980s, while attempting to somehow bring Taipei and Peking closer together, and as ambassador to Peking during the bloody Tiananmen massacre of 1989, he participated in and witnessws extraordinary changes while advancing America’s interests in Asia.
China Hands recounts his adventures as well those of three generations of his family-all of them absorbing, many of them exciting, and one unduly tragic. It is a fascinating and moving look at America in Asia. Asia itself, and the remarkable life of one especially capable america.
