Apple in China
The Capture of the World's Greatest Company
-
-
4.5 • 13 Ratings
-
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Chris Miller’s Chip War, a riveting look at how Apple helped build China’s dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands.
After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world’s most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century’s most iconic products—in staggering volume and for enormous profit.
Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponized.
In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple’s ascent and who tried to forge a different path, including the Mormon missionary who established the Apple Store in China; the “Gang of Eight” executives tasked with placating Beijing; and an idealistic veteran whose hopes of improving the lives of factory workers were crushed by both Cupertino’s operational demands and Xi Jinping’s war on civil society.
Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised “rebels” and “troublemakers”—the company that encouraged us all to “Think Different”—devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The computer maker that once dominated China's development into an industrial powerhouse is now dominated by China's government, according to this insightful debut account. Financial Times reporter McGee recaps Apple's 30-year process of shuttering its original American factories and outsourcing production to Chinese contract manufacturers. It's partly a saga of greed as Apple took advantage of Asia's lax regulations and its own bargaining power—Apple forced one firm to sign a production contract without reading it—to ruthlessly cut costs. But Apple also invested hundreds of billions of dollars in its Chinese suppliers, taught them state-of-the-art techniques, and brought them its own engineers and high-tech machinery. Apple eventually located most of its production in China, which, McGee contends, made it hostage to Beijing's whims. The company appreciated the government's policy of crushing labor unions and muting bad press but had to bow to demands to compromise customers' data privacy and accommodate censorship. McGee's perceptive account presents a cogent rethink of Apple's role in the global economy, painting the company as the de facto proprietor and active manager of China's advanced electronics sector. He also makes the potentially dry subject of global supply chains riveting, with epic narratives of bleeding-edge product design and colorful portraits of larger-than-life leaders. The result is a fascinating analysis of how global capitalism conquered China—and vice versa.
Customer Reviews
Eye opener
Fascinating, revealing and insightful. Simply impossible to put down.
Gripping. The author tells a complex story very well
Apple does a marvelous job of weaving a narrative for its customers: buy our product and your life will be transformed. And in some ways, it may be true. For many Apple customers, that promise and its fulfillment are enough to keep them firmly inside the Apple ecosystem.
But what McGee so masterfully explains in his book is that Apple’s ability to deliver on that promise, across multiple products over more than two decades, rests on a sort of Faustian bargain it has made with China Inc.
The CCP and hundreds of provincial and local officials enabled a product and manufacturing strategy that is simply not possible anywhere else on the globe. That strategy has helped catapult Apple to the loftiest position in capitalist economies.
But as McGee explains, the nearly invisible but dark underside of this bargain is a requirement for Apple to continue to transfer extraordinary tech knowledge and expertise to the Red Supply Chain, a group that also supports Apple’s competitors. Worse, it appears that attempts by Apple to extricate itself from this relationship will not only be difficult. It may be impossible.
McGee tells this story not with mind numbing tech speak but with the engaging prose of a mystery writer. I read the book in two days. I simply couldn’t put it down.
You’re probably reading this review on an iPhone. Read this book to more fully understand why your phone has the capability it does, sells for what it does, and why the nearly 20 year run of iPhone success probably won’t last.