James R. Lilley: Remembering a great China hand

By John J. Tkacik

James Lilley, the second director of the American Institute in Taiwan, passed away one year ago on Nov. 12. He was a great American and a legendary China hand whom I think of often. Throughout his career in the CIA’s clandestine service, the State and Defense departments, and as an elder statesman of US China policy, he was a nuanced diplomat who unwaveringly held the good of his country and his countrymen uppermost. He was a champion of strong US friendships with both Taiwan and China — and in those frequent debates when the US’ relationships across the Taiwan Strait proved to be a zero-sum game, Jim always tilted the balance in favor of US interests.

No doubt he would applaud US President Barack Obama’s current realism on China, a realism which sees the urgency of organizing the US’ friends and allies in Asia into a coalition to balance China’s alarming new aggressiveness.

Jim believed in ground truths about China and Taiwan. As he said to me personally, and often in public: “The first, I would say is, militarily: Deter adventurous military action by China ... and that can take many forms, but you have to be able to deal with their military.”

He believed in the importance of using the US’ economic leverage in “getting things done” with China, for example in nuclear proliferation, North Korea and Taiwan. If the US is timid in using that leverage, she is not likely to get much done with China.

Third, he wanted get the US out of the middle of Taipei-Beijing dynamics. He often spoke about Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) request in 1979 of George H.W. Bush “to help bring about reconciliation with Taiwan” and how he, Jim, warned the future US president “to be very careful on this one, the landscape is strewn with the wreckage of do-gooders who try to do this thing and get swallowed up by the Chinese.”

I recently listened to an audio download of one of Jim’s most memorable tours d’horizon on China, a lecture at the Heritage Foundation in July 2004. Jim delivered a particularly poignant reflection on the US’ collection and analysis of China intelligence. It was wonderful to hear his voice again and to absorb his plain-spoken wisdom on global affairs.

I was particularly struck by his advice to professionals in the field of China strategic and security analysis — of whom he was the apotheosis.
“We have to look very carefully at what we are collecting on China,” he said, “it’s not necessarily ‘group-think,’ but it’s ‘political correctness.’”

Jim reminisced about the “real tyrants” at the CIA who “had points of view,” were “brilliant in their writing, but biased in their perceptions, and maybe that helped at the time, to load up the [diplomatic] movements with intelligence, but you can’t do that ... the State Department can do it ... the agency [CIA] can’t!”

If he were alive today, I think Jim would be gratified that intelligence analysts who support Obama administration policymakers are now “very much aware of political correctness” — and are resistant to the “idea that there is a strategic partnership with China that is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, and that Taiwan is an obstacle to progress in that relationship.”

As Jim said: “I think our experience tells us that is a false concept, and the people that try to load up the intelligence to advance that position are not doing their country a favor.”

Jim was very uneasy with a political correctness that seeks “to paint the Chinese moves in the best possible light.”

Now, of course, even the “best possible light” is unable to disguise the peril in China’s diplomatic and military patronage of North Korea, Iran, Syria, Myanmar, India and Tibet, its hostility toward India, Japan and Taiwan, the South China Sea, and its successful arms race in space weaponry and cyberwarfare. China’s policies on global warming, trade, exchange rates and the mercantilistic acquisitiveness with which it pursues the earth’s raw materials, minerals and energy sources have been puzzling at best, hostile at worst, but in no way warrants any optimism whatever.

So, too, was the long-tattered state of US intelligence collection and analysis of Taiwan something that unsettled Jim. He could see that Washington’s understanding of Taiwan was being shaped by tendentious sources: “Things that have bedeviled us today were quite clear, had you had a clear view of politics in Taiwan and not been living in your own covert little world, and not reading the newspapers. I think that it is very important! And that was missed! I think some of the problems we’ve had derive from that inability to pick this thing [the emergence of a new Taiwan identity separate from China’s] out early.”

That is what intelligence is all about, he said. And the intelligence community failed to provide US political leaders with an accurate perspective on the most elemental forces in Taiwan’s politics. That led to a decade of dangerously jaundiced views in the top echelons of the US government toward Taiwan’s political leaders. The result has been that Taiwan’s voters, as well as its political leaders, have been seized with a despairing sense of abandonment by the US and may soon reach a “tipping point” where they cast their lot inextricably with China and against Taiwan’s traditional friends and allies in democratic Asia.

Jim and I did not wholly agree on the Taiwan conundrum. At the July 2004 Heritage lecture, Jim urged the administration of then-US president George W. Bush to move forward with arms sales to the Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) government. However, he cautioned Taiwan’s leaders then, “if you think, in Taiwan, because you have security and stability and US support, and then you move away from China; I think that’s moving away from the implicit understanding we had previously.”

He then looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, and said: “I know John Tkacik has problems with that, but that is the stream that I see.”

Of course, if you have to choose between Lilley’s advice and mine on this — I advise you to heed me. But I say that with profound humility and affection because Jim was perhaps the only grownup China hand in the business who eschewed political correctness, demanded sound judgment, insisted on US interests and offered all of the US’ Asia hands reasoned “adult supervision.”

In the past year, it seems to me, Washington has been following Lilley’s rules and — thankfully — the US’ Asia policy is now back on track.

John Tkacik is a retired US diplomat who worked frequently with James Lilley.