Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee

Overview

“Phenomenal...a jaw-dropping book.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Named by both The New York Times and The Economist as one of the best books of the year so far, this “scrupulously reported” (The New Yorker) and “astonishing” (The Daily Telegraph, London) book rivets with its portrayal of how Apple allowed itself to become dependent on China for a huge percentage of its manufacturing, making it vulnerable and unwittingly laying the groundwork for the Asian superpower to rival the US in technological expertise.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668053379
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Patrick McGee was the Financial Times’s principal Apple reporter from 2019 to 2023, during which time he won a San Francisco Press Club Award for his coverage. He joined the newspaper in 2013, in Hong Kong, before reporting from Germany and California. Previously, he was a bond reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He has a master’s degree in global diplomacy from SOAS, University of London, and a degree in religious studies from the University of Toronto. He and his family make their home in the Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

Named by both the New York Times and the Economist as one of the best books published so far this year!

“Phenomenal...a jaw-dropping book.”
—Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

“This is the best book about Apple ever written, one of the best books about China ever written, and one of the best books about tech, period.”
—Ben Thompson, Stratechery

“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....A persuasive exposé.”
—New York Times

“Flips the usual narrative about Apple and China on its head... forcefully argues that Apple may be the single biggest supporter of President Xi’s ‘Made in China 2025’ plan.”
—Vanity Fair

“Scrupulously reported.”
—New Yorker

“An eye-opening exposé ... [which] chronicles a lucrative relationship stained by manipulation, violence and abuse.”
—The Telegraph (UK)

“Few people are better prepared to discuss the symbiotic relationship between Apple and China than Patrick McGee... as [McGee] argues, China would not be China without Apple.”
—Bari Weiss, Honestly

“A riveting account of how Apple came to depend on Chinese suppliers for most of its products... [Apple’s] history holds important lessons for the two economies—and for other big manufacturers like Tesla.”
—Reuters Breakingviews

“Timely... McGee excels at describing the intricacies of supply chains... explains how Apple became inseparable from China and what the fracturing of global trade means for one of the world’s most valuable companies.”
—The Economist

“Remarkable... [breaks] the cone of silence.”
—The Circuit

“Incredibly timely... [McGee] has used [his] background to create a really comprehensive history telling a story that very few people truly understand.”
—Peter Kafka, Vox “Channels”

“Explosive... People should be reading this book and understanding the narrative.”
—Chris Voss, The Chris Voss Show

“An incredible story with profound implications for not just Apple but all of us who depend on China's manufacturing prowess and intricate supply networks to sustain our way of life.”
—Hidden Forces

“Fascinating... The fundamental issue here [is] whether or not we want our biggest company—our most innovative company, perhaps the paradigmatic company for America—to be that deeply intertwined with China.”
—Hugh Hewitt

“To call this book a page-turner is almost to diminish its importance. It is a once-in-a-generation read.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, author of the New York Times bestseller The Revenge of Geography and Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

“Deeply researched, disturbing, and enlightening...In these pages we watch as the world's most profitable company gets outmaneuvered by the world's most powerful dictator.”
—Chris Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Chip War

“In this hugely important new book, Patrick McGee shows us how Apple's quest for wealth and power in China may in the end be the undoing both of the company and of America's quest for technology supremacy.”
—Rana Foroohar, Financial Times Global Business Columnist, CNN Global Economic Analyst, and author of Makers and Takers

“Absolutely riveting. An extraordinary story, expertly told—and one that has important implications for Apple, for tech, and for global geoeconomics.”
—Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford and bestselling author of The Silk Roads

From the Publisher

2025-05-13
An exposé of how the quest for profit put a once-iconoclastic tech company into the orbit of a totalitarian regime.

Founded in 1976 in Silicon Valley, Apple once prided itself on building its own hardware and software, eventually offshoring some manufacture to Ireland and Singapore. Then, writesFinancial Times correspondent McGee, came the advent of “contract manufacturers” in places like South Korea, Mexico, and China, the last of them characterized by an irresistible-to-capitalists competitiveness built on what one Chinese scholar calls “low wages, low welfare, and low human rights.” That image does not square with Apple’s “think different” branding (or, for that matter, its iconic1984-themed ad of old), but Apple has long relied on China as not just a source of production but also a huge market, earning the company, by McGee’s account, some $70 billion a year. Apple has also trained huge numbers of Chinese engineers and fueled a homegrown computer and phone industry that in effect was built on its intellectual property. The flow of cash goes both ways; McGee writes that Apple spent so much money in China—by the company’s reckoning, to the tune of $55 billion a year by 2015, but possibly much more—that over time it has become “the world’s biggest corporate investor” in the country. Under Xi Jinping’s rule, Apple’s freedom of market movement has been curtailed, yet the savings in labor and materials keep the company captured there in the technical sense, even as Apple tries to placate the government by blocking virtual private networks (VPNs), restricting the use of AirDrop “after it emerged that Chinese citizens were using it to organize,” and otherwise bowing to the Chinese Communist Party. To no avail, McGee suggests: Apple is likely to come to an unhappy end in China as its chief domestic rival, Huawei, outstrips its market share, while Donald Trump’s trade wars may harm its bottom line in the near term.

A well-argued, eye-opening look at the dark side of globalism, and those who win and lose because of it.

Kirkus Reviews