APPLE IN CHINA

Apple in China – Review January 04, 2026 – By Tharishi Hewavithanagamage

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by investigative journalist Patrick McGee is a rigorously researched and unsettling account of how the world’s most valuable corporation became structurally embedded within China’s political-industrial ecosystem and, in doing so, helped accelerate the country's rise as a global manufacturing and technological powerhouse. The book explores how Apple’s integration into China was not merely a business strategy, but a geopolitical event that reshaped global supply chains, technological power, and the relationship between corporations and states.

Drawing on internal documents and interviews with more than 200 sources, including former Apple employees, McGee traces Apple’s evolution from near bankruptcy in the 1990s to global dominance, charting its gradual but decisive shift toward outsourcing – first to Japan and Taiwan and later overwhelmingly to mainland China. Rather than simply relocating production in search of cheap labor, Apple actively sought partners capable of advancing cutting-edge design and pushing the boundaries of manufacturing innovation. Through sustained investment in skills development, supplier coordination and production discipline, Apple transferred manufacturing expertise at a scale comparable to state-led industrial policy. In reframing globalization this way, McGee challenges the assumption that multinational corporations are autonomous winners in a liberal economic order; instead, he demonstrates how China strategically absorbed corporate capabilities, gradually reversing the balance of dependence. Decisions that were rational at the firm level – efficiency, scale, and speed – ultimately produced strategic vulnerability at the geopolitical level.

One of the book’s most compelling contributions lies in its analysis of power, compliance, and digital sovereignty, particularly after 2013 as China tightened political control under President Xi Jinping. As regulatory and political pressure intensified, Apple increasingly complied with censorship demands, data localization requirements, and app removals, prioritizing market access over commitments to privacy and freedom of expression. McGee illustrates how Apple’s celebrated control over hardware, software, and services proved negotiable when confronted by an authoritarian state capable of leveraging supply-chain dominance. These dynamics are especially resonant amid intensifying US-China technology rivalry, tariffs, export controls, and debates over decoupling. McGee’s comparison between Apple’s investments in China and recent US policy initiatives highlights the gap between decades of corporate-driven globalization and belated state efforts to reclaim strategic manufacturing capacity.

Apple emerges neither as villain nor victim, but as a powerful corporate actor constrained by the very system it helped build. While the book occasionally overstates Apple’s

centrality in China’s industrial rise and offers limited insight into internal Chinese policy debates, it remains a landmark contribution. Its central lesson is clear: global supply chains are not neutral economic instruments, but sites of power, leverage, and strategic consequence in an era of technological competition and geopolitical fragmentation.