Apple in China tells an interesting story: how Apple used China as a base from which to become the world’s most valuable company, and in doing so, bound its future to China, a ruthless authoritarian state.

Initially it looked like a win-win solution: Apple obtained hard working suppliers with low cost, whereby China received foreign investment which not only about profit, but they also acted as patron and mentor, financing, training, supervising and supplying Chinese manufacturers.

These seemingly mutually symbiotic relationships grew for the past 20 years or so. Apple trained at least 28 million workers in China – more people than entire labor force of California. And it rivaled China’s nation-building efforts in cost, man-hours, and impact. By 2015, Apple’s investments in China reached USD55 billion per year.

In return, Apple get the most efficient production line in the world. The tale of low wages, underage employees, sixteen-hour workdays and accusations of forced Uighur labor were widely known. But what is interesting is that Beijing played a long game. They has allowed these to happen. They let Apple to exploit its workers, so that in turn exploit Apple.

This started in 2013, when China began flexing its influence over Apple, using state media to criticize its practices and imposing rules like local data storage and App Store content restrictions. These moves showed how Apple’s reliance on China gave Beijing leverage to push its own goals, like strengthening domestic tech firms and controlling information.

Furthermore, from 2017 onward, Beijing increased their control, forcing local data residency (a joint-venture data center in Guizhou), constraining App Store content (including mass removal of VPN apps), and pressing Apple into deeper alignment with domestic partners, including state-backed semiconductor firms flagged as U.S. security risks. These moves revealed the political leverage China had accrued from Apple’s operational dependence.

This is a core geopolitical inversion: Beijing allowed Apple to exploit Chinese labor to accelerate Apple’s ascendancy—so that China could, in turn, exploit Apple’s dependence to advance its own industrial and information-control goals. As one former Apple engineer puts it: “We’ve trained a whole country, and now that country is using it against us”

To date, to reduce this dependency, Apple has started to outsource some of its iPhone assembly line in India and Vietnam. But as of 2023, 90% of Apple’s production, including iPhones, still happens in China, with 200 production lines producing out millions of units daily. The new locations still lack the full manufacturing ecosystems and still depend on Chinese components. Hence to replace this dependency is almost impossible, and if it’s probable, building similar systems elsewhere could take years.

In conclusion, Apple’s deep investment in China built an unmatched manufacturing system that fueled its success, but it also gave China the power to influence Apple’s choices, creating challenges for the company and U.S. interests that will be hard to unravel in the near future.

Note: This writing is originally an assignment from one of my Doctoral Study class to write a summary of a book: Apple in China. Disclaimer: I read the book, and used AI helps to summarize the book. But I wrote and rephrased most of them.