China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › Political
ISBN: 1586481363 / Publisher: PublicAffairs, May 2004
James Lilley offers a personal look at his life in Asia, begining with his childhood in Tsingtao China, discussing his thirty years in the CIA in such places as Tokyo and Taiwan, before taking a job with the State Department as a diplomat.
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James Lilley's life has been entwined with China's fate since 1917, when his father started selling kerosene for Standard Oil along the Yangtze River. Lilley spend his childhood in China, much of it in Tsingtao, a bustling, 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 II forced the 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 intelligence, 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.
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