Captured: The iPhone and China's Technological Influence
Director of the Online Master of Science in Cybersecurity policy track, Milton Mueller, recommends a compelling read on the development of Apple's globally distributed supply chain and how its foray into China impacted the ongoing U.S.-China tech war.
Globally distributed supply chains for digital products and services have become a controversial topic for industry experts and everyday people, as some feel that the globalization of production reduces cybersecurity. Yet, other experts, including myself, believe that global supply chains strengthen security, innovation, and consumer welfare by fostering cooperation and interdependence among countries and making supply chains more efficient.
With "Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company," Patrick McGee has written a splendid business history that also manages to wade into geopolitics, sometimes in a misguided way. The book’s underlying focus is the transnational division of labor that evolved in the digital industries, specifically the relationship between Apple and China. The bulk of the book documents the powerful techno-economic logic that led to the development of Apple’s distributed supply chain, and why and how it became concentrated in China.
Apple poured billions of dollars into creating the most advanced global supply chain. In its efforts, Apple supplied China with thousands of engineers and trained millions of workers, laying the foundation for a competitive Chinese electronics industry — a central concern in the ongoing US-China tech war.
The book discusses the ways Apple’s prominence in China’s economy led to its political engagement with China's Communist Party-controlled government. McGee characterizes this interaction as a one-way “capture” that gave the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) major leverage over the company. However, I find this interpretation to be distorted, as the “ever-increasing demands” the CCP allegedly places on Apple are not really that different from the demands the CCP places on all foreign companies and all domestic digital companies.
Reading the first part of the book, with its elaborate retracing of technology transfer and market growth, it is impossible not to admire the engineering expertise, design innovation, and business operations Apple brought to bear, as well as the efficiency and flexibility of the Chinese companies they worked with. Over 15 years, Apple has taken on the painstaking but beneficial process of working with Taiwanese entrepreneurs and their expansion into China to achieve unprecedented levels of quality, speed, and profitability.
McGee thus shows technology transfer in a globalized market, detailing how a dominant American company succeeded in spawning new competitors in a developing economy. Apple and Chinese electronics manufacturing benefited each other, and their specialization and division of labor benefited consumers across the world as well.
Author: Milton Mueller
Editor & Digital Producer: Kat Bell
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