Having spent his entire working life in the service of the United States government, mostly in Asia and as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Ambassador James Lilley gives an overview of his knowledge of the region at its most tumultuous and dangerous time. China occupies a large place in Lilley's life first because he was born there, and second because he worked there as a spy and as a diplomat. His last post was during the June 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square as the US Ambassador to China. Lilley and his family members know China first hand, which makes reading the book more interesting even though reviewers have warned that it is not a spy novel or a James Bond movie.

From the time he stepped off a Pan Am airplane in Tokyo in November 1951 to take up his first assignment as a CIA agent in Japan at the age of 23, Lilley was witness to of the most troublesome periods in Asia. Japan had been defeated in World War II just a few years before and the Korean War was at its height. The CIA operation at that time was (1) to support the 1.6 million KMT soldiers left behind in the mainland, (2) to aid the "Chinese third force" composed of former KMT officers who supported neither Chiang Kai-shek nor Mao Tse-tung and who hoped to return to the Mainland to overthrow the Communist regime and (3) to undertake operations to collect information from the Mainland. But the Korean War altered that three-point operation. The Korean War also changed Mao's plan to invade Taiwan and gave Chiang Kai-shek a free hand in Taiwan. Lilley was then transferred to Hong Kong and the Philippines to start new CIA operations.

Later on in the early 1960s, he went to South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to continue setting up the CIA network and activities aimed at containing Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. As President Richard Nixon prepared to set up diplomatic relations with China and sever ties with Taiwan, Lilley was sent back to China. This was shortly after the 1972 issuance of the Shanghai Communiqué, which became the basis on which US-China relations have been built. In the 1970s, the US and China had not yet established embassies and formal ties, and Lilley was the covert CIA operative in the US Liaison Office in Beijing, working along with American diplomats trying to collect information about China. Lilley said he had the "good fortune" to work for the US Ambassador to Beijing at the time, George H. W. Bush, who later became the Director of the CIA and finally President of the United States. Their relationship helped to propel Lilley's career to higher levels in Washington's policymaking apparatus.

The development of US policy on China took place during those early years after the Shanghai Communiqué, particularly after 1978 when President Jimmy Carter and Beijing issued their final communiqué. The new policy resulted in the US breaking diplomatic ties with Taiwan and the termination of mutual defense with and removal of US military personnel from Taiwan. But Lilley was in that year cut off from the negotiating process of US normalization of ties with China under a Democratic White House. Republicans, including Lilley, were unhappy about the White House selling off Taiwan for China, but they considered the switch inevitable. Lilley was sent to become the head of the American Institute in Taiwan while in Washington, Secretary of State Alexander Haig became an outspoken "China supporter," who considered China a "strategic imperative." A great part of Lilley's China Hands is devoted to the problems in Taiwan, which began with the US establishing diplomatic ties with China. Those problems, including security issues and the sale of American weapons to Taiwan, still exist today. But Lilley's stay in Taiwan, beginning in 1982 under the Reagan administration, also began his career as a diplomat despite his continued ties with the CIA. The "Golden Years" for Lilley were the years he spent in Taiwan trying to rebuild confidence in the island after the dramatic break of diplomatic ties between Washington and Taipei. Lilley said that by the time he left Taiwan in 1984, the island had made a clean break with the past and embarked in the democratization process and economic development.

"I had done my work. It was time to go home, at least for a little while," he said.

After George H. W. Bush won the White House in 1988, Lilley was appointed Ambassador to China and arrived back in Beijing in March 1989 to find himself in the midst of the start of the student demonstrations at Tianamen Square. He called it rightly "stepping on a volcano." The chapter on the events in Tianamen Square is worth studying for it explains Beijing's handling of the demonstrations and the subsequent political implications for the rest of the world. With his vast experience as an old China hand, Lilley was able to manage the months during which chaos descended on China. Lilley offers his personal views about the future of China and Taiwan, two prosperous but politically troubled nations in East Asia.