The geopolitical ramifications of Apple’s relationship with China

I just finished Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, a new book by Canadian journalist Patrick McGee. It is stuffed with fascinating insights into the surreal scale and strangeness of the iPhone-building business, but it is also about how iPhone has changed the world in ways that transcend tech:

The prevailing western narrative about Apple in China is remarkably narrow. The go-to story of the past two decades has been about the tedium of assembling Apple products, a tale of low wages, underage employees, 16-hour work days, suicides at Foxconn and allegations of forced Uyghur labour.

This narrative isn’t wrong, but it misses the biggest piece of the puzzle. It’s not just that Apple has exploited Chinese workers, it’s that Beijing has allowed apple to exploit its workers, so that China can in turn exploit Apple. It would be banal to say that Apple wouldn’t be Apple today without China. There is no other place on Earth that could have provided similar costs, efficiency, and scale. What this book contends is more intriguing: that China wouldn’t be China today without Apple.

And more still: it’s not just that Apple and China have made each other what they are, it’s that they are also interdependent to a degree that has daunting geopolitical ramifications, far beyond anything I understood before reading this book. And although they depend on each other, it’s not an equal relationship! China hold most of the cards. Not only is Apple much more vulnerable to Beijing’s whims than I knew, we are all much more vulnerable in ways that hardly anyone has understood. It is … not good.

The point isn’t to condemn Cook or apple; it’s to convey the predicament they are in. At the turn of the millenium, Washington made a bet on China: a bet that free trade would liberalize the country, and perhaps catalyze the creation of the world’s biggest democracy.

Instead, trade enriched China, and empowered its rulers.

Oops.