There are books that arrive at the right time to make you rethink what you thought were to know. ‘Apple in China: The Capture of The World’s Greatest Company‘, just published by Patrick McGee, he is one of them.
Your central thesis It smells awkward truth: Apple did not conquered China. It was China who conquered Apple.
For years we have seen this relationship from our perspective: not China and not American, but western. Apple brought innovation, jobs and modernity to China. Silicon Valley’s classic story exporting democratic values through trade. But McGee turns that narrative around. And when he does, everything takes on another meaning. More uncomfortable. More real.
On March 15, 2013, the exact moment in which Apple understood the rules. After a campaign orchestrated on Chinese state television, Tim Cook was forced to publish an apology letter in Mandarin for iPhone guarantee policies.
That was a symbolic genuflection that revealed the true nature of power in that relationship. The CEO of which It was already the most valuable company in the worldPublicly forgiveness to an authoritarian regime.
- From the western perspective, he was humiliating.
- From China, it was probably logical: a multinational adapting to local customer service standards.
The trap was perfect because Apple had fallen in love with something that only China could offer: ability to climb without limits. Pasa from zero to 200 million iPhone manufactured a year required impossible industrial coordination anywhere else.
Apple was completely delivered: it formed 28 million Chinese workers, invested $ 7.3 billion in own equipment within foreign factories, sent its best engineers. McGee makes a devastating comparison:
A private company investing in a country more than the greatest industrial effort of the American state.
But Apple built that cathedral without understanding what land erected it. Without a single executive residing permanently in China. No diplomatic strategy. No contingency plan.
While Apple taught its industrial secrets, Beijing did not trap, it simply applied state capitalism strategically. Used their advantage (giant market + industrial capacity) to achieve technological transfer and know-how That then be able to explode. It is not very different from what the United States does with Tiktok or Huawei.
Over the years, the balance was reversed. In silence. It was no longer Apple who imposed conditions:
Apple adapted. One after another. Noiseless. Without public protests. What was the alternative? Lose access to 20% of its turnover and dismantle a supply chain that had taken decades to perfect. No CEO would come out of a board of directors after proposing this idea.
The book has an important weakness: It is deeply western in its sources:
- McGee builds his narrative mainly from Apple internal documents and testimonies of American executives.
- There is barely Chinese perspective. We do not know what Beijing really thought, what its internal strategy was, or how they see this relationship from the other side.
It’s like counting the cold war only with pentagon files. Chinese workers appear more as a statistical resource than as actors of their own destiny.
And there comes the paradox. Instead of transforming China, Apple ended up transformed by it. The most controversial decisions of the Cook era – centered, transfer of data, silence against repressions – are the calculated price of continuing to operate in the largest consumer market in the world: 1.4 billion. It is a price that Apple continues to pay each quarter.
Tim Cook inherited an Apple admired for its creative independence. AND In his legacy It will be triggered financially, expand it towards the services and diversify catalog in vertical and horizontal. But will also leave an Apple cornered by its logistics units.
Today Try to diversify towards India and Vietnambut structural damage is already done. Not only because most of its chain continues in China, but because Apple learned to bend. And to each market, someone else dictates the conditions. Especially when it has no alternatives.
“Apple in China” is not really a book about Apple. It is a book about power in the global era. On how The company that believed that the excellence of the product guaranteed strategic independence discovered that in geopolitics, margins do not vote.
Behind the iPhone that we carry in the pocket there is more than technological innovation. There are calculated assignments, silent adaptations, a reheilibrium of power so progressive that it was barely noticed until it was irreversible.
If the Chinese market could redefine the rules for Apple, what multinational company really controls its destination?
Outstanding image | Patrick Fore in Unspash
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