For decades, policymakers assumed that economic integration with China would liberalize its politics and embed it in a stable, interdependent global order. Few companies embodied that optimism more than Apple. Patrick McGee, author of the popular book Apple in China, argues that Apple’s rise in China helped accelerate the development of the very industrial ecosystem that now underpins Beijing’s technological and geopolitical power.
McGee reported for the Financial Times from 2013 to 2025, covering global technology and supply chains from Hong Kong, Germany, and California. His debut book draws on more than 200 interviews and traces Apple’s deep integration into China’s manufacturing system. He studied religion as an undergraduate before “journalism sort of just… fell into it.” His reporting eventually converged on three themes: China, supply chains, and Apple.
McGee’s time in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement sharpened his understanding of Beijing’s trajectory, and of President Xi Jinping. “It became real clear, if you’re paying attention, that he was not… just like a menial successor to Hu Jintao,” he says of Xi. “He was taking China in a different direction.”
McGee’s central argument in Apple in China is a challenge to conventional wisdom. Apple’s move to China was not primarily about cheap labor, he argues. “Cost is baked into what China was offering, but it’s not the prime thing,” McGee says. “It was really much more about capabilities.”
China offered Apple abundant, flexible labor and, crucially, a state-supported system that could mobilize hundreds of thousands of temporary workers for product launches. “America, for instance, just does not have the industrial ecosystems where you can have a factory that literally has 400,000 people working, but only [for] the iPhone launch,” McGee says.
Apple did not simply exploit those conditions. It trained and upgraded them. “Apple finds that China is a place where they can send literal plane loads of engineers in and train up the workforce,” McGee says. Manufacturing design teams installed advanced machinery and taught engineering processes across hundreds of factories. “Technology transfer is just embedded in that process,” he says. “This is not a story of China figuring out how Apple worked and stealing it from them,” McGee argues. “This is Apple playing the role of Prometheus, literally handing the Chinese the gift of fire.”
That dynamic, he argues, reshaped global tech power. “Apple hasn’t just created a problem for itself, it’s created a problem for the West,” McGee says. Over time, Apple consolidated production almost entirely in China. “All roads lead through China when you’re talking about the supply chain,” he says. Even production shifts to India often rely on components and processes that first pass through Chinese factories.
McGee does not deny harsh labor conditions in some facilities, but he offers a deeper view. “This is not a story about Apple exploiting Chinese workers,” he says. “This is a story about Beijing allowing Apple to exploit Chinese workers, because the way that it is able to then exploit Apple is an even bigger piece of the puzzle.” Beijing’s long-term strategy, dating to Deng Xiaoping, sought to “lure in capital, lure in expertise, and learn this stuff.” Apple became one of the most effective conduits for that learning.
Apple’s corporate identity complicates the picture. The company once celebrated figures like the Dalai Lama in its “Think Different” campaign. Over time, its dependence on China constrained its public posture. When unrest erupted at a major Foxconn facility in 2022, McGee recalls that Tim Cook faced questions and “just pretends that he’s not there.” He describes it as “the worst 45 seconds of Tim Cook’s career.” There was “no good answer to those questions,” he says, because Apple had become “so beholden to the Chinese Communist state.”
For policymakers, McGee cautions against simplistic solutions. He does not believe re-shoring iPhone production to the United States is realistic. “It’s a total fantasy to think that the next iPhone… is going to be built in Pittsburgh or something,” he says. Apple builds roughly one million iPhones a day, each with around one thousand components. “That’s a billion components a day, just-in-time manufacturing at the highest quality levels,” he says.
The real lesson, in McGee’s view, is that diversification among allies is what’s needed. “It’s not a geopolitical risk to be dependent on your allies,” he says. Dependence on China across batteries, pharmaceuticals, solar panels, and electronics is “a major risk.” Shifting supply chains to India, Mexico, and other partners would not eliminate globalization, but rebalance it.
“I don’t think trading with China or even investing in China was necessarily a mistake,” McGee says. The mistake was “the complete over-consolidation into China.” Apple’s story, he argues, reveals how corporate strategy and state ambition intertwined to produce consequences far beyond quarterly earnings.
