Apple in China: How the World’s Greatest Company Rewired a Superpower

In recent decades, few stories in global business have been as consequential—or as misunderstood—as Apple’s entanglement with China. Patrick McGee’s new book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, is both startling and illuminating, upending many of our assumptions about how tech, economics, and geopolitics have intersected to change the world.

This is not your typical polemic about offshoring or globalization gone awry. It is a deeply researched, jaw-dropping account that shows how Apple, in the pursuit of perfecting its world-famous gadgets and delivering outsized returns to shareholders, inadvertently became a nation-building force—training millions, investing billions, and ultimately retooling an industrial fleet that now powers much of China’s technological ambitions.

Building China: The Apple Effect

Ask yourself: How does a single American company become the engine of transformation for the most populous country on Earth? By 2015, McGee reveals, Apple was plowing some $55 billion a year into China, investing not only in goods and products but in the very machinery and workforce needed to make them.

For context, the Biden administration’s highly touted CHIPS Act, which aims to bring America’s semiconductor industry back home, is costing $53 billion—over four years. The most ambitious industrial aid the U.S. can muster is dwarfed every year by what Apple alone pumped into China at its peak.

Much of this isn’t just cash: it’s knowledge, training, and process. Apple did not own the factories (in a way analogous to how Uber doesn’t own cars), but exercised tremendous control over equipment, processes, and quality. The company trained upwards of 28 million workers—more than the entire labor force of California since 2008—in advanced manufacturing, with many acquiring skills far beyond so-called “assembly line” work. Many are highly credentialed engineers and PhDs working in vast campuses like Foxconn’s.

Apple became, in effect, China’s biggest vocational school. And its suppliers, technical partners, and even competitors all drew benefit.

From “Cheap Labor” to Electronics Superpower

It’s tempting to see China’s rise as a tale primarily of low-cost labor lured east by Western corporations. But, as McGee makes clear, it’s about much more: rapid upskilling, relentless investment, and technological transfer.

Apple’s investment isn’t just about assembling phones. Chinese firms that started as bit-part suppliers now make up 55% of the world’s smartphone market, names like OPPO, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi. Ironically, the company that revolutionized the phone market found itself leapfrogged in its very own supply base. Suppliers trained to Apple’s exacting standards turned around and began powering rivals—not just in phones but, increasingly, other electronics, including electric vehicles and even advanced drones and military technologies.

“EVs are smartphones on wheels,” jokes McGee, highlighting how the entire electronics ecosystem—built originally for Apple—has migrated up the value chain.

No American company has ever invested so much in a single foreign country—the scale is half again as much as the cost, in today’s dollars, of the entire Marshall Plan (which rebuilt 16 European nations after WWII), but all in one country, and all routed through the private sector.

The Political Backlash and Xi Jinping’s Crackdown

For years, Apple’s story in China was one of unmitigated success. The iPhone was a status symbol coveted by millions. But as China’s ambitions shifted under Xi Jinping, so too did the political terrain.

In 2013, on a day known as Consumer Day (March 15th), Apple was publicly attacked by Chinese state media for allegedly treating Chinese customers worse than others—claims later shown to be more complicated. Behind the scenes, Apple scrambled to placate local officials, assembling a “Gang of Eight” senior executives in China to make the case that it was a key engine of China’s own success.

At the same time, as Apple’s involvement deepened, so did its vulnerability. Chinese competition, increasingly sophisticated, surged. In 2019, Huawei outsold the iPhone globally; panic spread in Cupertino, and the internal mood became apocalyptic. The company was being outmaneuvered by the very ecosystem it had spent billions building.

The Geopolitical Wild Card: Huawei, Trump, and American Policy

Then came the Trump administration, which famously pressured Apple to “bring jobs home” but, somewhat ironically, rescued the company by targeting its top Chinese rival. When the U.S. government declared Huawei a national security threat and cut it off from American technology—including key chips and Google’s Android software—Huawei’s global business cratered, and Apple’s market share in China doubled almost overnight.

But this is no permanent reprieve. Chinese companies, forced to stand on their own, have doubled down on self-sufficiency with projects like HarmonyOS (Huawei’s mobile operating system) and advanced chip manufacturing. What started as an American-led technological revolution in China could ultimately seed a homegrown ecosystem, increasingly cut off from Western control—and ripe for international export.

America’s Hollowed Industrial Core

Why didn’t the United States keep this value and talent at home? The answer is multifaceted: shareholder capitalism drove the relentless search for cost minimization, while China’s dense, flexible, and ruthlessly efficient manufacturing hubs couldn’t be matched by American cities. Corporate bravado notwithstanding, even Apple’s highly touted “$500 billion investment” in the U.S. is, McGee argues, mostly a mirage, a blend of PR and creative definitions (such as including share buybacks and dividends as job creation).

The painful truth, as the book argues, is that America’s manufacturing base was hollowed out by a generation of policy and business decisions going back to the 1980s and 90s. Apple was the last holdout; when it finally moved, the transformation was total.

A Competitive Market in an Authoritarian State

The ultimate irony? By exporting not just jobs but know-how, Apple (and companies like it) helped create China’s ruthlessly competitive electronics market. Unlike the U.S., where antitrust interventions are wielded to break up monopolies, China’s market is fragmented—and intense—thanks to skills and capacity originally fostered by Western investment.

But that same skill base now powers not just consumer electronics, but electric vehicles, drones, and military hardware—altering the balance of power and raising urgent questions about the cost of globalization and tech transfer.

Lessons for the Future

Apple in China is more than a corporate biography. It is a cautionary tale about the unforeseen consequences of shareholder-driven globalization—a story of opportunity, ambition, and the double-edged nature of knowledge transfer in a world where economic power and national security are ever more entwined.

The next time you pick up your iPhone, remember: it is not just a product of Apple’s design, but of a vast and complicated chain of events, decisions, and investments that reshaped both America and China in ways few could have predicted.