Apple
Used China to Make a Profit. What China Got in Return Is Scarier.
In “Apple in
China,” Patrick McGee argues that by training an army of manufacturers in a
“ruthless authoritarian state,” the company has created an existential
vulnerability for the entire world.
Hannah Beech
By Hannah
Beech
Published
May 15, 2025
Updated May
16, 2025, 2:54 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/books/review/apple-in-china-patrick-mcgee.html
A little
more than a decade ago, foreign journalists living in Beijing, including
myself, met for a long chat with a top Chinese diplomat. Those were different
days, when high-ranking Chinese officials were still meeting with members of
the Western press corps. The diplomat whom we met was charming, funny, fluent
in English. She also had the latest iPhone in front of her on the table.
I noticed
the Apple gadget because at the time, Chinese state news media were unleashing
invectives on the Cupertino, Calif.-based company for supposedly cheating
Chinese consumers. (It wasn’t true.) There were rumors circulating that Chinese
government officials were being told not to flaunt American status symbols. The
diplomat’s accouterment proved that wrong.
At the time,
one could make the argument that China’s economic modernization was being
accompanied by a parallel, if somewhat more laggardly, political reform. But
the advent in 2012 of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader who has consolidated power
and re-established the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party, has shattered
those hopes. And, as Patrick McGee makes devastatingly clear in his smart and
comprehensive “Apple in China,” the American company’s decision under Tim Cook,
the current C.E.O., to manufacture about 90 percent of its products in China
has created an existential vulnerability not just for Apple, but for the United
States — nurturing the conditions for Chinese technology to outpace American
innovation.
McGee, who
was the lead Apple reporter for The Financial Times and previously covered
Asian markets from Hong Kong, takes what we instinctively know — “how Apple
used China as a base from which to become the world’s most valuable company,
and in doing so, bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian
state” — and comes up with a startling conclusion, backed by meticulous
reporting: “that China wouldn’t be China today without Apple.”
Apple says
that it has trained more than 28 million workers in China since 2008, which
McGee notes is larger than the entire labor force of California. The company’s
annual investment in China — not even counting the value of hardware, “which
would more than double the figure,” McGee writes — exceeds the total amount the
Biden administration dedicated for a “once-in-a-generation” initiative to boost
American computer chip production.
“This rapid consolidation reflects a
transfer of technology and know-how so consequential,” McGee writes, “as to
constitute a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
McGee has a
journalist’s knack for developing scenes with a few curated details, and he
organizes his narrative chronologically, starting with Apple’s origins as a
renegade upstart under Steve Jobs in the 1970s and ’80s. After Jobs’s firing
and rehiring comes a corporate mind shift in which a vertically integrated firm
falls for the allure of contract manufacturing, sending its engineers abroad to
train low-paid workers in how to churn out ever more complicated electronics.
We only
really get to Apple in China about 90 pages into the book, and that China, in
the mid- to late 1990s, was mainly attractive because of what one China scholar
called “low wages, low welfare and low human rights.” McGee relates how one
Apple engineer, visiting suppliers in the southern Chinese manufacturing center
of Shenzhen, was horrified that there were no elevators in the “slapdash”
facility, and that the stairs were built with troubling irregularity: with,
say, 12 steps (of varying heights) between the first and second floors, then 18
to the next, then 16, then 24.
But China at
the turn of the millennium was in the process of joining the World Trade
Organization, and its leaders were banking on an export-led economy that would
learn from foreign investors. Starting in the 2000s the Taiwanese mega-supplier
Foxconn constructed entire settlements for Chinese workers building Apple
electronics. First up on the new assembly lines were iMacs that were produced
by what became known as “China speed.”
Less than 15
years after Chinese workers began making Apple products en masse, Chinese
consumers were buying them en masse, too. Covering China at the time, I chafed
at the popular narrative that reduced Apple’s presence in China to a tale of
downtrodden workers at Foxconn and other suppliers. Yes, there were nets
outside factory dorms to prevent suicides; and wages remained low. Even Apple
admitted to alarming labor abuses in its Chinese supply chain.
But that was
only half the story. The iPhone in China signified success, an individualistic,
American-accented flavor that seemed to delight both veteran diplomats and
Foxconn workers I got to know in southwest China. Those of us who had lived in
China for years could see that life was getting freer and richer for most
Chinese. By the mid-2010s, it was the United States that seemed behind in terms
of integrating apps into daily life. In China, at least in the big cities, we
were already living in the tech future.
Yet there
were episodes of unease. After Xi came to power, state media campaigns targeted
Apple’s Western “arrogance.” Apple acquiesced to Beijing’s demands that it
remove the New York Times app from its online store in China and keep Chinese
user data in China rather than the United States, prompting worries about
government intrusion. As Xi cracked down on labor rights activism, more
independent audits of the Apple supply chain ceased.
In 2015,
Apple was the largest corporate investor in China, to the tune of about $55
billion a year, according to internal documents McGee obtained for this book.
(Cook himself told the Chinese media that the company had created nearly five
million jobs there: “I’m not sure there are too many companies, domestic or
foreign, who can say that.”) At the same time, Xi laid out “Made in China
2025,” his blueprint for achieving technological self-sufficiency in the next
decade, dependent on Apple being what McGee calls “a mass enabler of
‘Indigenous innovation.’”
“As Apple taught the supply chain how
to perfect multi-touch glass and make the thousand components within the
iPhone,” he writes, “Apple’s suppliers took what they knew and offered it to
homegrown companies led by Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo.” Today, some of these
premium products come with specs that are increasingly ahead of American
design, and have outsold Apple in many major markets.
Sometimes,
McGee is too comprehensive. He draws interesting portraits of characters who
disappear after a few paragraphs. We do not need to know the full name of the
law firm that Apple hired in preparation for a possible bankruptcy in the
mid-1990s or even the minutiae of pre-China personnel wrangles, especially when
centuries of Chinese history are compressed to less than a page. There are a
few Chinese misspellings and miscues — the surname Wang is not, in fact,
pronounced quite as “Wong.” And it would have been nice to have gotten more
perspectives of Chinese people.
But these
are quibbles with an otherwise persuasive exposé of the trillion-dollar
company’s uncomfortably close relationship with the global power. China may
have enabled Apple to become one of the most profitable companies in the world,
but the exploitation goes both ways: This is not just a story of China making
Apple, but of Apple making China. Given Xi’s authoritarian hold on power, what
began as a feat of manufacturing has troubling consequences for the entire
world.
APPLE IN
CHINA: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company | By Patrick McGee |
Scribner | 437 pp. | $32
Hannah Beech
is a Times reporter based in Bangkok who has been covering Asia for more than
25 years. She focuses on in-depth and investigative stories.
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