Apple in China Audiobook By Patrick McGee cover art

Apple in China

The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection of titles.
Yours as long as you’re a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for $8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Apple in China

By: Patrick McGee
Narrated by: Fred Sanders
Try Standard free

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $22.49

Buy for $22.49

“Phenomenal…a jaw-dropping book.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Named by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Prospect magazine as a best book of the year, this “scrupulously reported” (The New Yorker) and “astonishing” (The Daily Telegraph, London) book rivets with its portrayal of how Apple allowed itself to become dependent on China for a huge percentage of its manufacturing, making it vulnerable and unwittingly laying the groundwork for the Asian superpower to rival the US in technological expertise.

After struggling to build products on three continents, Apple turned to China’s seemingly endless supply of cheap labor. It soon deployed thousands of engineers, trained millions of workers, and invested hundreds of billions of dollars to create the most advanced global supply chain. These efforts fueled the iPhone’s dominance—but also laid the foundation for a powerful, state-supported Chinese electronics industry. What began as a business decision evolved into a cautionary tale of global trade, tech rivalry, and national security.

Without intending to, Apple helped Beijing acquire technological influence that could now be weaponized—a central concern in the ongoing US-China tech war. Drawing on over two hundred interviews, Patrick McGee exposes never-before-reported details from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen: internal emails, secretive executive meetings, and overlooked voices inside the company’s China operations.

You’ll meet the “Gang of Eight” executives tasked with appeasing Beijing, a Mormon missionary who launched Apple retail in China, and a veteran whose dreams of improving factory conditions were crushed by both Apple’s demands and Xi Jinping’s authoritarian crackdown. From Foxconn and Tim Cook to the Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan Semiconductor, this is a revelatory look at how Apple, in seeking efficiency, became entangled in the very politics it once claimed to challenge.

For readers of Chip War, American Factory, and The Big Short, Apple in China is a searing examination of corporate power, Chinese nationalism, deglobalization, and the fragile relationship between Silicon Valley and the world’s rising superpower. Economics Geopolitics Globalization International International Relations Politics & Government China Technology War
Comprehensive Insights • Fascinating Research • Engaging Story • Eye-opening Revelations • Detailed Analysis

Highly rated for:

All stars
Most relevant
I was a very early adopter to Apple products, all the way back to 1984. This book is clearly researched well, almost all of the Macintosh history rings true with my own understanding of its development. But had no idea that ALL of it went to China decades ago. We have trained them well, and almost all of us are complicit. And I’m typing this on an iPhone 14. I won’t upgrade to the AI version, there’s no reason for me to believe it won’t be loaded with CCP malware. And I’ll probably go to a Samsung phone next.

Disturbing and Equally Important

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
if someone doesn’t turn this into a movie, the world will be at a loss. this would be more riveting by 100x compared to something like The Social Network.

the movie is going to be insane

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A remarkable book, one of the most revealing books I have ever read!
Highly recommended!

How much risk Apple in China really is…

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Interesting perspectives and insights on the inner workings of the large tech company operating in a foreign country and the power that the country can exert on that company to manipulate it’s businesses is interesting.

Insightful and informative

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You sure that narrator didn’t use AI voice instead of reading himself? Audible: re-record with different narrator! Other than that 9/10. Needs to be made to movie

Riveting story… marred by AI-narration.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews