James Lilley, who died on Nov. 12, served as the senior US diplomat in both Taipei and Beijing, and was therefore intensely interested in Taiwan-China interactions. But he also had a healthy skepticism of the supposed benefits of cross-strait peace if it meant Taiwan were to be absorbed by China. Jim’s uppermost concerns were the values of freedom and democracy and the interests of the American people.
He was always unsettled by colleagues in the State Department and the CIA who insisted on what he called a “political correctness, 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.”
He was particularly worried that there were people in the US government who could only think of Taiwan as an “obstacle” to US-China cooperation.
In July 2004, when we at The Heritage Foundation hosted a launch for his book China Hands, he mentioned this in his remarks (listen to them at multimedia.heritage.org/mp3/lehrman-122004.mp3 at minute 32:30). He worried that too many people in the CIA, in particular, “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 can’t. And I think we’ve got to be very much aware of political correctness.”
Of the idea that our “strategic partnership with China is the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” he said that “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 a towering figure in US policymaking in Asia, from his years in Taipei as director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), when he helped guide then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) away from reactionaries like General Wang Sheng (王昇) and toward democratization, and his tenure as ambassador in South Korea during the violence of June 1987 to his steady hand as ambassador in Beijing during Tiananmen and its aftermath.
As US assistant secretary of defense in 1992, I can say from personal knowledge that he single-handedly managed to get president George H.W. Bush to approve F-16s for Taiwan, and then sidestepped State Department anxieties. After his retirement in 1993, Jim continued his involvement in cross-strait affairs, and was one of the true “Wise Men” (or, as some called them, “grown-ups who offer adult supervision”) of the China field.
I worked twice for Jim — indirectly in 1981-1982 when I was on the Taiwan Staff at the State Department and he was AIT director, and more directly when I was deputy consul general in Guangzhou and he was my ambassador in Beijing.
Of the eight ambassadors I worked for, he was by far the best, and I worked for many great ambassadors — Leonard Woodcock in Beijing, Leonard Unger in Taipei, Stape Roy also while I was in Guangzhou, and Burt Levin when I was in Hong Kong. All superb diplomats, but Jim was the best — a true leader and inspirational, he respected his troops and was liberal in his praise of their work (and while quick to discipline some, he never seemed to hold a grudge); he was quick-witted and intellectual; and he was a generous advocate for the families of his staffers. He was the perfect ambassador.
I shall always remember him fondly for his career help and personal kindnesses to me, and my deepest sympathies and affection go out to his wife Sally and his entire family.
John Tkacik is a retired US foreign service officer with postings in Taipei, Beijing, Hong Kong and Guangzhou. He was chief of China intelligence at the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the first Clinton administration.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was “amazed” and “enthralled” by Chinese who rise at 3am for work. He praised it as a manifestation of talent and a good work ethic. Truthfully, that praise and statement about China, no matter its motivation, is nothing more than a round of applause for the atrocities inflicted by dictators and the spiritual anesthesia of their victims. “There’s just a lot of super-talented, hard-working people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing,” Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday. “And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they’ll be
“There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it,” US President Joe Biden said after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended global geopolitics. Far from Earth, that transition is already happening. Just like in the era of Sputnik and Apollo more than half a century ago, world leaders are again racing to achieve dominance in outer space — but there is one big difference: Whereas the US and the Soviet Union hashed out a common set of rules at the UN, this time around the world’s top superpowers cannot even agree on basic principles to govern
With a Taiwan contingency increasingly more plausible, Taiwanese lobbies in Japan are calling for the government to pass a version of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), emulating the US precedent. Such a measure would surely enable Tokyo to make formal and regular contact with Taipei for dialogue, consultation, policy coordination and planning in military security. This would fill the missing link of the trilateral US-Japan-Taiwan security ties, rendering a US military defense of Taiwan more feasible through the support of the US-Japan alliance. Yet, particular caution should be exercised, as Beijing would probably view the move as a serious challenge to
As the Soviet Union was collapsing in the late 1980s and Russia seemed to be starting the process of democratization, 36-year-old US academic Francis Fukuyama had the audacity to assert that the world was at the “end of history.” Fukuyama claimed that democratic systems would become the norm, and peace would prevail the world over. He published a grandiose essay, “The End of History?” in the summer 1989 edition of the journal National Interest. Overnight, Fukuyama became a famous theorist in the US, western Europe, Japan and even Taiwan. Did the collapse of the Soviet Union mark the end of an era as