James Lilley's life and family have been entwined with China's fate since his father moved to the country to work for Standard Oil in 1916. Lilley spent much of his childhood in China and after a Yale professor took him aside and suggested a career in intelligence, it became clear that he would spend his adult life returning to China again and again. Lilley served for twenty-five years in the CIA in Laos, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taiwan before moving to the State Department in the early 1980s to begin a distinguished career as the U.S.'s top-ranking diplomat in Taiwan, ambassador to South Korea, and finally, ambassador to China. From helping Laotian insurgent forces assist the American efforts in Vietnam to his posting in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, he was in a remarkable number of crucial places during challenging times as he spent his life tending to America's interests in Asia. In China Hands, he includes three generations of stories from an American family in the Far East, all of them absorbing, some of them exciting, and one, the loss of Lilley's much loved and admired brother, Frank, unremittingly tragic. China Hands is a fascinating memoir of America in Asia, Asia itself, and one especially capable American's personal history. "A real-life boys' adventure story that will have many grown-ups staying up past their bedtimes....filled with gripping anecdotes skillfully rendered." -- The New York Times During a government career spanning four decades, James Lilley served in the CIA, White House, State Department, and Defense Department. He is the only American to have served as the head of the American missions in Beijing, where he was ambassador from 1989-1991, and Taiwan, where he was Director of the American Institute in Taiwan from 1982-1984. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 1986-1989. He is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Jeffrey Lilley is a journalist. He lives in Silver Springs, Maryland, with his wife and two sons. China Hands Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia By James R. Lilley PublicAffairs Copyright © 2005 James R. Lilley All right reserved. ISBN: 9781586483432 Chapter One "WHERE THE DAISIES COVER THE COUNTRY LAND" My family's connection with China began in the shadow of thepicturesque peaks that line the country's great waterway, theYangtze River. There, in 1917, in the heartland of a country known byits people as the center of the world, my father was traveling upstreamon a Chinese junk. Along the way he recorded the family's first imagesof life in the Middle Kingdom, a place that we would work in andaround for the next nine decades. From his perch on the junk, my father admired the Yangtze's dramaticscenery and noted the exotic names of some of its gorges-oxliver, wild duck, and horse lungs. At the Wushan Gorge, "the greatgloomy gorge of the river" as he called it, cliffs rose up over the Yangtzeto heights of a thousand feet and channeled rapids that could break aboat into pieces. "Awe-inspiring in its massive ruggedness," my fatherwrote in his diary of the trip. During the journey upstream, a hundredlaborers, trudging at times along narrow paths carved into the limestonerock, used ropes to haul the boat against the current. Later my fatherheard gunshots that signaled the start of a battle between armiesof opposing warlords. Exotic scenery, perilous rapids, backbreakinglabor, and brewing conflict-my father recorded it all. Frank Walder Lilley II had arrived in China a year earlier. Afterdropping out of Cornell University, he had gone to California to "seekhis fortune." But destiny drew him farther afield. After reading in alocal newspaper that the Standard Oil Company was looking for singlemen to go to China, he sent in an application. When he was accepted,he joined a growing corps of marketers, or "classmen" as they werecalled, for John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company of New York,or SOCONY. The men were sent all over the world to sell oil and oilproducts. They were part of America's expanding economic empire. The commitment my father made to work for Standard Oil was excessiveby today's standards. He agreed to learn Chinese, work withoutvacation, and stay unmarried for three years. But at 26, sporting a mustacheand a piercing gaze, he was eager for adventure. And without acollege degree, he was happy to have a steady job. SOCONY employees called their work "selling oil for the lamps ofChina," and it became an almost messianic mission to spread lightaround China and make profits for "the company." The sign of SOCONYwas a flying red horse, and it came to be recognized around thecountry. In those days, in a phrase that conjured up thoughts of empire,it was said that Standard Oil's holdings in the world were so vast thatthe sun never went down over the business. That scenic ride up the Yangtze dropped my father off in Wanxian, acity