Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
How Apple Helped China Become a Tech Superpower
When Joe Biden’s Department of Justice sued Apple for antitrust violations in late March 2024, Wall Street’s media arms switched into concerned patriot mode. “Why go after … the crown jewel of American innovation?” CNBC host Becky Quick asked Tim Wu, a Columbia professor and intellectual architect of the Biden antitrust agenda. Couldn’t this suit “change the way we innovate, the way we lead?” Forbes cut to the chase, warning the suit would “weaken the U.S. in its strategic competition with China.”
Such appeals to global competitiveness have emerged as a popular rhetorical defense amid Big Tech’s broader antitrust reckoning. Government cases against Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta, we are told, will make America more like the overregulated innovation backwater of Europe, and allow a surging Chinese tech sector to overtake Silicon Valley. In the Trump era, this kind of “national champion” argument has had some success, as when the administration bullied Canada in June into rescinding a digital services tax that would have put U.S. Big Tech firms on the hook for billions of dollars in retroactive levies.
As Wu pointed out to Quick, this rhetoric misrepresents the role of antitrust enforcement in the innovation ecosystem. But in the case of Apple specifically, a revelatory new book challenges an even more foundational assumption of the national champion argument. In the battle for global technological leadership, we should not assume that Apple plays on the American side.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, by Financial Times reporter Patrick McGee, is “the first major history of Apple in the 21st century,” and the first-ever history focused on how Apple has manufactured its revolutionary products. Drawing on interviews with over 200 former Apple executives and engineers, as well as previously unreported internal documents, the book goes deep into the evolution of Apple’s supply chain over the last three decades. In so doing, it makes the provocative argument that Apple has not simply benefited from cheap Chinese labor, as widely assumed, but that it has also played an indispensable role in making China the tech superpower it is today.
Such appeals to global competitiveness have emerged as a popular rhetorical defense amid Big Tech’s broader antitrust reckoning. Government cases against Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta, we are told, will make America more like the overregulated innovation backwater of Europe, and allow a surging Chinese tech sector to overtake Silicon Valley. In the Trump era, this kind of “national champion” argument has had some success, as when the administration bullied Canada in June into rescinding a digital services tax that would have put U.S. Big Tech firms on the hook for billions of dollars in retroactive levies.
As Wu pointed out to Quick, this rhetoric misrepresents the role of antitrust enforcement in the innovation ecosystem. But in the case of Apple specifically, a revelatory new book challenges an even more foundational assumption of the national champion argument. In the battle for global technological leadership, we should not assume that Apple plays on the American side.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, by Financial Times reporter Patrick McGee, is “the first major history of Apple in the 21st century,” and the first-ever history focused on how Apple has manufactured its revolutionary products. Drawing on interviews with over 200 former Apple executives and engineers, as well as previously unreported internal documents, the book goes deep into the evolution of Apple’s supply chain over the last three decades. In so doing, it makes the provocative argument that Apple has not simply benefited from cheap Chinese labor, as widely assumed, but that it has also played an indispensable role in making China the tech superpower it is today.
https://prospect.org/culture/books/2025-08-01-how-apple-helped-china-become-tech-superpower/]