Book Review - The Washington Post

[johnkarls]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/20 ... ick-mcgee/


How Apple’s lucrative bet on China boosted the country’s tech sector
Patrick McGee’s “Apple in China” examines the company’s complex relationship with China and the lasting effects of that alliance.

Review by Jacob Silverman - an independent journalist in NYC, he’s the co-author of the New York Times best seller “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud” (Abrams, 2023), the author of “Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection” (HaperCollins, 2015), and the author of “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley,” (Bloomsbury in October 2025).

May 24, 2025


As the world’s first $3 trillion publicly traded company, Apple is an unusual kind of political actor — endlessly resourced, capable of shaping a nation’s industrial policy but still buffeted by the great forces of statecraft, of history. Apple may have the gross domestic product of a small nation, but it doesn’t have an army; it must play by others’ rules.

That’s the broad contention of “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company,” the new book by Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee, which charts Apple’s development into a design and manufacturing powerhouse dangerously “dependent” on the profitable relationships and supply chain networks it’s helped create in China, the company’s second-largest consumer market. Over the last two decades, under the leadership of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Apple has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Chinese markets, enough to constitute, in McGee’s view, a distinct “geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall — but it’s an event that played out over many years, hidden by the twin threats of strict nondisclosure agreements and a censored media landscape.”

The result was an extraordinary transformation of Apple’s production processes — the development of a “red supply chain” — that simultaneously helped inculcate China’s increasingly competitive tech sector. As McGee describes it, Apple “sleepwalked into a new reality,” performing an accidental act of nation-building as it leveraged China’s cheap labor, poor rule of law and extraordinary economies of scale. By some measures, Apple’s expenditures exceeded those of the post-World War II Marshall Plan.

First in Taiwan and then in China, Apple worked with partners, such as the future electronics-manufacturing giant Foxconn, that could turn “fields into factories” within months. Taiwanese and Chinese firms offered Apple whatever it wanted, even working at cost. As Terry Gou, the swashbuckling CEO of Foxconn, had demonstrated, “the value of working with Apple was the learning.”

Apple wasn’t merely outsourcing the manufacturing of its devices; the relationships were complex and ongoing. The company sent fleets of engineers, designers, managers and other staffers who “co-invented” new production processes alongside their Chinese counterparts. Apple created 5 million jobs in China, according to Cook. The air travel was so heavy that Apple persuaded United to establish new direct flights from San Francisco International Airport to booming Chinese industrial hubs. By the start of the pandemic, McGee reports, Apple was buying 50 business-class seats every day on flights from San Francisco to Shanghai.

“Apple in China” is an occasionally dry industrial and corporate history, but it is also an insightful account of how a powerful company might be “captured” by the lucrative temptations of the ultimate labor and consumer market. Some of the book’s best sections chronicle the tangled relationships of Chinese entrepreneurs — from gray-market iPhone resellers to founders of large manufacturing concerns — with a giant American company that was content to follow the political winds, wherever they might blow.

After investigations revealed widespread labor abuses at Foxconn facilities and other parts of Apple’s supplier network, Apple responded with some genuine reforms. But the company also sidelined its principal executive devoted to improving its labor practices. At the same time, the ascent of President Xi Jinping, China’s strongest leader in generations, precipitated a nationwide crackdown on labor activism. As one critic tells McGee, Apple experienced little cost to working in a “totalitarian” environment.

Under the famously assiduous Cook, Apple may have mastered its supply chain and production processes, but it also developed its hand at politicking, with Cook making regular visits to Chinese leaders. The company also made concessions, such as removing VPN apps from its App Store and storing customer data within China. McGee quotes Cook as saying that there’s value in showing up, in engaging in these markets. But critics say he’s being used by China, while Apple is protected from Xi’s consolidation of power, which has seen some Chinese tech moguls imprisoned or otherwise brought to heel.

With financial investment, the build-out of industrial capacity, and the transfer of knowledge and expertise, Apple’s investments in China helped nurture its future competitors, although the book may underplay the role of China’s state industrial policy in its now-massive tech sector. McGee describes the rise of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, as essentially taking Apple by surprise. But here, too, Apple benefited from political connections, as President Donald Trump’s first administration initiated sanctions that — for a time — kneecapped Huawei’s burgeoning smartphone business. Cook in turn courted Trump, leading the president in 2019 on a tour of a Texas factory that was supposedly an exemplar of Apple’s return to U.S. manufacturing.

As McGee notes, the tour was a bit of a farce. Trump declared in a tweet that he had persuaded Apple to open the factory, but the facility, which was owned by a subcontractor, had for years produced Mac Pros, a minor product in Apple’s lineup. Initially, the Texas factory struggled with errors in its production processes. Eventually it brought in some outside help: Chinese engineers from Foxconn. “The irony is hard to overstate,” McGee writes. “After more than a decade of sending its top engineers to China, to train staff on how to build things at Apple quality, Cupertino needed to fly Chinese engineers into America’s heartland to complete the project.”