He Knows His Subject

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When Mao Zedong's Communist revolution completed its sweep of the mainland in 1949, the oft-asked question in Washington was who had "lost" China. Former American spy, diplomat and straight shooter James Lilley argues in his sweeping memoir China Hands that this historical puzzler is a red herring: America never had China, and the very idea is counterproductive. To influence China, America first has to respect that the vast land has its own interests and ways. Lilley knows. He was born in Qingdao, the son of an American oil executive, and China has been the center of his life. China Hands, which is co-authored by Lilley's journalist son, Jeffrey, is a survey of postimperial Chinese history, a compendium of American blunders in troublesome nations, and it has some pretty good locker-room tales about spies, including how, using his covert-messaging skills, Lilley helped a colleague bag another man's fiancé.

Lilley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) right out of Yale, and his dozen postings included Laos, Hong Kong and Beijing, where with Mao's consent he was the first U.S. intelligence attaché to Communist China. Lilley has little positive to say about the CIA's activities in Asia, and many of his tales end in tragedy or farce, such as the incident in which a group of visiting U.S. congressmen debriefed a senior agent one afternoon in Vientiane only to stumble upon the same officer later that night laying naked on the floor of a bar, braying, "I want it now."

Lilley is a self-described pragmatist—no surprise coming from someone who was Washington's top diplomat in both Beijing and Taipei—and he says the U.S. influences China best not through military might but through a combination of economic muscle and human interaction. "Our effort should be to bend China, not break it or change it fundamentally," Lilley says, quoting the report he filed at the end of an explosive two-year ambassadorial term in Beijing that began with the Tiananmen massacre. "Deng Xiaoping's new China was tainted because the blood of Chinese workers and students had been spilled," he writes. "June 4 would not slide inconsequentially into the backwaters of history."

The memoir tends to meander, but that's the result of its strange conception. Lilley's son Jeffrey initiated the project more than five years ago to learn more about his father's idealistic, superachieving brother, Frank, who committed suicide at the age of 26 while posted in Japan as a detachment commander during the U.S. military occupation. A pacifist, Frank was crushed by the destruction he saw in Japan and felt conflicted by his belief that military might was America's way forward, which he expressed to his younger brother in a good-bye letter. Frank, a world-record swimmer and president of his class at Exeter, figures prominently, and the two brothers become a study in contrasts: the disillusioned idealist vs. the studied, realistic, flexible bureaucrat. James Lilley is the brother who survived—and he believes that only through pragmatism will the U.S.-China relationship survive, as well.