Published May 15, 2025Updated May 16, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u9605\u8bfb\u7b80\u4f53\u4e2d\u6587\u7248<\/a>\u95b1\u8b80\u7e41\u9ad4\u4e2d\u6587\u7248<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n APPLE IN CHINA: The Capture of the World\u2019s Greatest Company<\/strong>, by Patrick McGee<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t true.) There were rumors circulating that Chinese government officials were being told not to flaunt American status symbols. The diplomat\u2019s accouterment proved that wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, one could make the argument that China\u2019s 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 \u201cApple in China,\u201d the American company\u2019s 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 \u2014 nurturing the conditions for Chinese technology to outpace American innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McGee, who was the lead Apple reporter for The Financial Times and previously covered Asian markets from Hong Kong, takes what we instinctively know \u2014 \u201chow Apple used China as a base from which to become the world\u2019s most valuable company, and in doing so, bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state\u201d \u2014 and comes up with a startling conclusion, backed by meticulous reporting: \u201cthat China wouldn\u2019t be China today without Apple.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s annual investment in China \u2014 not even counting the value of hardware, \u201cwhich would more than double the figure,\u201d McGee writes \u2014 exceeds the total amount the Biden administration dedicated for a \u201conce-in-a-generation\u201d initiative to boost American computer chip production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis rapid consolidation reflects a transfer of technology and know-how so consequential,\u201d McGee writes, \u201cas to constitute a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n McGee has a journalist\u2019s knack for developing scenes with a few curated details, and he organizes his narrative chronologically, starting with Apple\u2019s origins as a renegade upstart under Steve Jobs in the 1970s and \u201980s. After Jobs\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201clow wages, low welfare and low human rights.\u201d 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 \u201cslapdash\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cChina speed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s presence in China to a tale of downtrodden workers at Foxconn and other suppliers. Yes, there were nets outside factory dorms<\/a> to prevent suicides; and wages remained low. Even Apple admitted to alarming labor abuses in its Chinese supply chain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
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