Patrick McGee’s Apple in China reveals how Apple’s $55B annual reliance on China—22% of revenue—fueled its competitors like Huawei, now holding 55% of the global smartphone market. Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs on iPhones ignore Apple’s $70B China revenue and the impracticality of shifting production, despite India’s limited role in its supply chain. McGee argues China’s industrial policies outmaneuvered U.S. corporations by combining cost, quality, and scale, while Apple’s platform rules suppress criticism of Beijing. The U.S. must leverage ideals and alliances—not outdated tariffs—to counter China’s rise, avoiding Cold War-era mistakes with a far larger adversary. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Patrick McGee, the author of Apple in China, the capture of the world's greatest company, a really terrific piece of journalism about this company.
It matters a lot.
As I understand, Donald Trump, at the core of his trade policy and his foreign policy, is trying to set up the U.S. to endure the rise of China and to have the U.S. remain the dominant power in the West.
Whether Trump is doing that right or not is another question.
But part of that is to stop allowing or to encourage American businesses to bring American business home and to stop treating other countries as if they were just states in America.
In other words, we trade with them, but then they block our trade and they borrow us from their markets.
This is Trump's complaint and what he's trying to stop.
But, you know, the complexity of disengaging from the globalist economy is baffling.
And if you want to see it at its most baffling, you have to read this book by Patrick McGee, Apple in China, the capture of the world's greatest company.
It is an amazingly strange and terrifying story and not at all what you expect it to be.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I read this, for five years, year after year, Apple poured more money each year into China's chip development than the American government has poured into American chip development altogether.
Is that not quite, not chip development.
So I'm comparing Apple's investments into China being 55.
Sorry, now I'm the one who's got, okay, so $55 billion a year is what Apple was investing into China, according to a 2016 document referring to the prior year.
And that May, 2016, sort of the same period that Donald Trump is running for president on his America First policy, Tim Cook goes to Jiangnanghai, the sort of equivalent of the White House in China, and pledges to invest $275 billion over the subsequent five years.
Now, look, those are the numbers that we have.
There's nothing about that being the end of the spending, as it were.
In other words, $55 billion is just 22% of Apple's revenue.
And it's from a supply chain report that Apple itself put together to understand how much are we contributing to this country?
Because two years prior, they had worried about being blacklisted.
Xi Jinping had come in, really didn't understand Apple's contributions to the country and thought of it as an exploitative power.
You know, thought Apple feared being blacklisted the same way that Google and Facebook are.
And so they hired a bunch of senior executives to sort of be the eyes and ears of Cupertito, if you will.
And for the first time, you had senior people living in China trying to understand the culture, trying to understand the politics.
And it really put Apple's operations into the local language, as I put it.
And so they come up with this investment figure to sort of flip the narrative on its head and say, you have no idea how much we're contributing to this country.
And yeah, the numbers are so stunning that if you take Marshall Plan spending after World War II, convert it to $2015, you get to $130 billion.
So half what Apple was spending in a similar time period, five years.
But I guess the thing that I'm trying to respond to that I haven't actually talked about with other people is that if you just did the math and you said, okay, so 22% of their revenue is spent on investments in China, and you just said, okay, well, why don't we just tally that up from 2008 to 2024?
That's probably a back of the envelope accurate way of saying what the actual investment is.
And that would be north of 800 billion.
So the crazy thing about the book, right, is not to say that Apple is stuck in China.
It's that they're stuck on the very capabilities they created in China.
So basically, Apple moves its operations to China in the early 2000s at a time when made in China is synonymous with shady quality, right?
But it's nothing sinister about that, right?
They're just trying to.
No, not at all.
I really defend Apple in a certain respect.
I mean, that was the American worldview.
We thought we were going to inculcate the next great democracy.
And so everybody was moving to China, not ideological at all.
And nobody should be blaming Apple for hollowing out American manufacturing in the 80s and 90s when we really lost our hold on it.
Because Apple, under Steve Jobs, especially, even when Steve Jobs goes to next computer, he's like sort of like exile years from Apple.
You know, he says of the next computer, my favorite thing about it is that it's not built in Osaka, right?
Because quality manufacturing was in Japan at the time.
And Apple is like the last holdout.
Everybody else either goes bankrupt or they outsource to Asia.
And Apple hasn't done so, but they're literally days away from missing payroll.
And so they have to sell a factory in Colorado and it begins a big global outsourcing push.
Takes them a few years to consolidate into China, but China basically wins out against about eight other countries that are competing for Apple orders.
So they do that.
And then Xi Jinping comes in and he says, we don't like you guys.
And they're like taken aback, right?
This is when, this is 2013.
Yeah, within 36 hours of Xi Jinping becoming president, you have something called Consumer Day, which is when every year companies are called out for not living up to the socialist ethos of the country.
Nothing necessarily nefarious about that, but suddenly Apple is in the crosshairs and sort of doesn't understand why.
And the allegation is that their warranty policies are different and inferior in China versus the rest of the world.
It's wildly complex as to why they're called out, but this was a story that was covered by every media outlet.
And it's sort of a mystery that I finally solved in the writing of the book, actually after I submitted the first manuscript last September.
And so maybe I'll just like leave it to the reader there, but it involves organized crime groups in China.
It's a wild narrative of how these scalpers sort of took over the market across China.
They ended up zapping the iPhone computer chips, masking their country of origin because they were stealing them to the United States, just all sorts of crazy things that are going on.
And eventually their complaints about how Apple responds to them leads to the higher echelons at the Communist Party becoming upset with Apple.
And then Apple is sort of attacked in what I call a digital blitzkrieg until Tim Cook in Mandarin on Apple's China website apologizes.
Did he actually kowtow to them?
I put it in a parenthetical note because I only had one source.
And he said, Tim Cook did more than write a letter in Chinese.
He flew to Beijing and at a private meeting.
And then the person says something along the lines of the Chinese would never let you off with a written apology.
You have to go there and you have to bow.
So I don't know it for a fact.
And I can't really say who the sourcing was, but someone who possibly could have known, but probably was in the room.
All right.
So now they go into lessen their costs.
And we always complain about Apple being iPhones being made by slave labor.
Tell me what that literally means.
When we say slave labor, what are we talking about?
So I want to be clear.
I don't say slave labor.
I did listen to your podcast last week or I watched it on YouTube.
And I know you had a segment on that.
I kind of flipped the narrative on its head here.
I mean, look, you and I wouldn't want to do these jobs.
And when I asked the senior Apple executive, how do you make an iPhone?
He played a famous clip.
I think it's from I Love Lucy, where they're on, where there's a conveyor belt and there's chocolate that they're making.
You're familiar with this?
Famous.
It's quite a thing to show me as how an iPhone is made.
So look, a conveyor belt job isn't great.
I mean, it is the fact that you can have that job for 12 hours a day.
You know, there's penalties for smiling.
There's penalties for laughing.
It's not the sort of job I would want my own children to be in when they come of age or something like that.
But you've got to understand that in China, the people that are taking those jobs are usually from the rural hinterlands where they would prefer to be in an air-conditioned factory doing that sort of job than toiling in the fields for 14 hours a day.
And they can make more money in a month than sometimes you would make in multiple months doing it.
So, you know, I guess it's slave labor if you look at it from the perspective of American, because you're thinking in the early 2000s, well, 50 cents an hour for 12 hours a day, that's awful.
But look, the hardworking Chinese, this is how they became really dominant.
So my story is not about Apple exploiting Chinese workers.
My story is about Beijing allowing Apple to exploit its workers so that Beijing can exploit Apple in the form of technology transfer.
Because what they understand really better than anybody else is that if you lure in foreign capital and have everybody manufacture in your country, there is just a natural engendering of the technology process that goes to your own workers.
And then with those skills, they create their own firms.
So, you know, a company like Foxconn is Taiwanese, but Taiwan's companies are not the ones getting the latest orders for something like the Lux Share.
I'm sorry, something like the Vision Pro headset, which is made by Luxhare, which is a Chinese rival to Foxconn.
So there's a huge transfer of knowledge, an epic transfer of knowledge.
I literally compare it to a geopolitical event like the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And we really are at a stage here where Apple, any number of American companies, but Apple has the know-how.
They know how to build an iPhone, but they can't execute the plans outside of China because they're utterly dependent on all the skills that they created there.
So just to put this as simply as possible, they go in to make it cheaper.
These are mostly women who are doing these 12-hour, 11, 12-hour day works because their hands are smaller, right?
I mean, that's.
Yeah, I mean, there's a great book from, I think, 2006, Wall Street Journal reporter, and it's called Factory Girls.
And it is because they're predominantly female.
Okay.
And so Apple is using them and Beijing and China is saying, yeah, okay, use them, but you're going to give us your technology, right?
They're not stealing the technology.
Apple is giving it to them.
That's sort of the argument.
Yeah.
I mean, so China for a long time was advocating joint ventures.
And what that means is that, you know, if me and Andrew want to go build a business in China, China says sounds good, but 50% of the business is owned by us.
And the whole point is that the Chinese are going to learn what Andrew and Patrick are skilled at, and then they're going to be able to thrive on their own, probably to the point where Andrew and Patrick no longer have a business in the country.
I mean, that is quite specifically what they wanted to do in the automotive world, for instance.
After 2001, when China joins the World Trade Organization, that's effectively not supposed to happen anymore, but it doesn't stop happening.
It just sort of evolves a little bit, and these deals become more like voluntary, you know, in quote marks of something like a high-speed rail.
You're just given like the biggest orders you've ever seen if you're a Siemens, if you're a Kawasaki, if you're a Bombardier, and you're put in a sort of prisoner's dilemma knowing that the same deal has been offered to your competitors.
And so you voluntarily agree to go do a joint venture.
Apple is a little bit different.
Apple is really orchestrating events from afar.
And because they're so secretive, someone like Xi Jinping really wouldn't know what the contributions were of the company.
And so after Apple feels like it's going to be blacklisted, they sort of flip the narrative on its head.
And Tim Cook goes to Jiang Nanghai, Citadel of Communist Power in May 2016 and really explains: you don't understand our business.
Our business is that we send plane loads of engineers to hundreds of factories and we train, train, train.
We audit, we supervise.
We get them working way beyond their actual capabilities, not just their perceived capabilities, their actual ones.
And I say that because Apple spends literal billions of dollars buying the machinery, you know, installing it, writing the software for it, and allowing these companies to build Apple products at massive scale.
So it's a combination of just, you know, 230 million iPhones being built a year, 1,000 parts per day, and hundreds of factories are doing this at the highest quality, highest quantity levels.
The problem is, what do they do with the skills that they are given?
And of course, well, they build their own industry.
So the reason why Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, et cetera, have 55% global market share in the smartphone world is that Apple taught all of their suppliers.
And so the Chinese are dominant.
This obviously wasn't intentional to some degree on the part of Apple, but it's a wild negative externality to use the economics jargon.
So they've taught these people.
I mean, these are obviously, I'm going to assume that Apple has the greatest tech people in the world, right?
Yeah, if Apple is sending its best engineers, I think you can say it is sending America's best engineers.
So the best engineers in America going to China and teaching them to do, and what can they do besides building Huawei phones?
What can they do with the technology?
Exactly.
And I mean, in a sense, I could just leave it to the user's imagination.
I mean, if you're becoming an expert in chip fabrication and electronics production, what would you use that skill for?
The most obvious one where I think you see the most direct evidence is how good the Chinese are building electric vehicles, right?
What is the slang term for an EV?
It's an iPhone on wheels.
And some of the biggest makers of EVs in the last few years are the smartphone makers.
So Xiaome and Huawei aren't just smartphone makers anymore.
They make EVs.
Apple's Best Engineers00:03:28
That's partly because of Apple.
It's partly because of Tesla, because Tesla, when they wanted to build in Shanghai, and this is a section in the book, they specifically adopted the Apple model.
They specifically hired people with Apple experience to set that into motion.
So sometimes people think Tesla did well in China and helped the EV sector in China because they inspired the other companies.
Their marketing was great.
And the Chinese thought, hey, these are really cool.
I am going to buy an EV.
That's all true.
But Tesla also did the same thing where they would, to localize their supply chain, they would send engineers to go improve the quality at these companies.
And then again, so what do they do with the skills?
They supply BYD and now BYD sells more cars than Tesla.
And the other side of this, I mean, is now Apple is indebted to China.
You know, I have Apple TV.
I think they're actually doing a good job with programming.
But in your book, you say that they have two rules.
I can't remember what the first rule is, but the second one is no hardcore.
And the second one is no criticism of China, right?
Yeah.
Well, we saw this with Jon Stewart, right?
The reason why Jon Stewart is back at the Daily Show is for the third season of his Apple TV Plus program.
He was going to create a show about China, an episode about China.
And I don't have this directly, I should say.
This is a great New York Times report from two years ago.
I'm saying that just because I was on the Jon Stewart show.
So I want to make it clear.
I don't have that information.
Where, yeah, he basically was told by Apple executives, like, no, you're not.
And they wanted to sort of, you know, look at the show, scrape, censor it, what have you.
And he said basically like, you know, I'm not doing that.
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You do not look a day over 150.
And at my age, that is a big compliment.
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Now, one of the things that got me about this book is that Apple, I mean, you said, you said that one of the problems you had was you fell in love with Apple.
I could really see why.
That's not quite what I said.
I want to be clear.
As the journalist, you don't want to be writing really favorable things about the company.
I mean, it's fine to do that once in a while.
But in 2022, in the summer, I was realizing.
you know, if you look just at the sort of Android to iOS conversion rate, if you will, there's just a steady accretion year in, year out, where people are dropping Samsung or what have you and moving to iOS.
Generationally, it's even more stark.
So like your generation, my generation, it's 50-50 in America between iOS and Android.
The next generation, it's like nine out of 10.
And so I was just thinking, wow, these are some great stories to be writing about how Apple sort of got a lock-in in the ecosystem and especially generationally for all these high school kids.
China's Strategic Move00:13:59
You know, when they go to college, they're probably all going to buy AirPods.
They're probably all going to buy MacBooks, et cetera.
And so I just began to ask the opposite question, which is, well, what's the Achilles heel of the company?
What could stop this rosy scenario of coming true?
So it's not that I was sort of too in love with Apple, and I'm certainly not trying to attack Apple, but I think as a journalist, it makes sense to say, what's the SWAT analysis of the company?
What could go wrong?
And I just began to be stunned at how much I was learning and how little it had actually been covered.
And I have to say, the story is mind-blowing, but at the same time, you are looking and thinking, this is a good company in terms of it's incredibly creative.
They solve problems like the guys in the movie Apollo 13, they seem to just solve every problem creatively.
The pandemic actually was kind of almost, is it fair to say it was helpful to them?
It's so nuanced.
I mean, it's true that Apple revenue really does well after COVID, but there's sort of multiple factors.
One is that Trump 1.0 knocked out their key rival, Huawei.
So in 2019, Huawei actually sells more smartphones globally, not just in China, globally, than the iPhone.
And then Trump deprives them of basically Google services and smartphone chips made by the likes of Qualcomm.
So they no longer have 5G technology.
So if you're a luxury buyer in China in particular, Huawei was dead to you essentially.
You weren't going to not buy a 5G phone.
And so Apple's market share in China goes from 9% to 17%.
The other thing is that COVID really, you know, was with everybody working from home, whether you're here or really anywhere else, you decided to upgrade your sort of portfolio of electronics, right?
Your home office.
And so again, Apple really benefited there.
So it was a sort of combination of those two things.
But they did have supply chain challenges.
I think in the end, they were immaterial and really sort of demonstrated the resilience of their supply chain.
And so it wasn't good in every respect.
And then the sort of hidden thing is that Apple was no longer able to send, you know, 500 people for every iPhone launch is the number I was given before COVID.
It fell to 30 to 50 people and they were sending them by private jet going from San Jose to Alaska and then over to Shanghai.
You really couldn't get the numbers.
But what happened is I assumed that once COVID was quote unquote over, you went back to 500 people, right?
You sort of went back to the old model.
And in fact, they didn't.
They had sort of proven to themselves that the Chinese teams, the local R ⁇ D centers really stepped up and that they were able to complete the iPhone production cycle without relying on that.
That's great for Apple's margins.
It's great for their operating costs, but there's definitely a loss of control there because you're sending less of the American engineers to sort of tally up and do everything and audit everything.
Basically what they found is that their Chinese team can take care of it.
Again, that's great.
But on a geopolitical scale, I don't know that that's great.
It means that the Americans are sort of losing out on the control that they've had for the last 20 years over their own products.
Well, let's talk about this.
So, we're talking to Patrick McGee, the author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, truly a remarkable piece of journalism.
Let's talk about Donald Trump.
Now, everybody's screaming at Donald Trump, and it's very hard.
It's always very hard for me to peg Donald Trump down because what he says and what he does are often different, and he does that intentionally.
I mean, as part of his negotiation technique, he announced that he was going, or thinking of imposing 25% tariffs on Apple specifically, not on a country, but on this actual company, which I guess is as rich as most countries.
He wants Apple to come out of China.
He says he wants them to come build things here.
Is any of that possible?
What is possible?
So, first of all, let me just say: I've never heard of a tariff on an individual company before.
I mean, this is probably novel and it's more narrow than you said.
It's essentially an iPhone tariff, right?
So, it's not even devoted to AirPods and everything else.
It's just the iPhone.
So, this is pretty remarkable.
There's no really fair way to say this.
It's delusional.
You're not going to have iPhones made in Pittsburgh or Texas anytime soon.
Now, you might, you might have assembly of iPhones here.
Now, that takes tens of thousands of people, but at best, you would have sub-assembled iPhones coming from China and then being put together here.
I say that because that is what they're doing in India.
Now, Apple, I think, has ambitions to really move the breadth and depth of the supply chain.
I shouldn't say move to, let's say, replicate.
Okay, they're not going to move from China.
They get $70 billion a year from China.
The idea that they're going to exit China is ludicrous, but they might be able to sort of like, you know, instead of untie the knot in China, they might retie another knot in India and have a bifurcated supply chain.
That, in my mind, is the most optimistic scenario.
Can they instead tie the knot in America?
They really cannot.
And we can talk about why, but I mean, there's probably about 20 reasons why it's not going to happen.
Give me one or two big ones why it can't happen because I'm always interested in this.
So, I mean, the obvious one would just be that our wages are much, much higher.
Our wages are high, right?
Yeah.
People aren't really going to be working 12-hour days doing this sort of conveyor belt, I love Lucy stuff we talked about earlier.
The density of the population just is not going to match it at all.
I mean, we're talking about a Foxconn factory that has 400,000 people, 500,000 people.
And then the dynamism of the population is not going to get there either.
In other words, when we're talking about 400 or 500,000 people in a factory, we're not talking about those people being there all year long, right?
They go from factory to factory and do seasonal work in a sense.
Seasonal, not in the sense of like the changing weather patterns, but the changing demand patterns, right?
What Foxconn is good at is having people sort of deployed on the factory line and giving Apple what's called manufacturing as a service.
And then, you know, Apple's not having to pay these workers when they're not building iPhones.
They go do something else.
And FoxCon is able to allocate those resources in a way that like we could just never keep up with.
I mean, it's just not going to happen.
India at least has the potential to do it.
Pittsburgh does not.
When Tim Cook recently said he was moving stuff to India, that's not real, is it?
I mean, they're moving assembly.
They're not moving all of the supply chain.
So I've got some internal documents that talk about 1,700 factories.
Much more than 50% are in China.
And we're going down four levels in the supply chain, four tiers.
Apple often puts out this document that says they have 200 factories, and people get misled by that because that's just tier one, but they go down four tiers.
So none of that really is moving to India.
It's just final assembly.
So Foxconn is indeed building dorm rooms and stuff to house, you know, 30,000 people to build iPhones, but they're only doing the final step of the process.
So try to think about there's a thousand components being made in every iPhone.
And you're doing up to a million iPhones a day.
So that's a billion parts being produced a day.
India is not remotely capable of doing that.
And could it be for 15 years if it can be done at all?
But if India can't do it with its advantages in terms of density, low wages, and all the incentives it can offer, certainly not going to happen in America.
And I want to be clear, ideologically, I love the idea of building an America.
That sounds fantastic.
I would love to see an American revival.
I mean, I'm a real bull, as it were, on investments in America.
I think the Chips Act is fantastic, but tariffs are like an 18th century tool, and we need 21st century industrial policy.
So how about that?
One thing, by the way, we should mention is that Apple is China is also one of Apple's great customers, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
So they're selling a lot of Apple iPhones in China.
I mean, so I don't have the most recent numbers, but in the Financial Times two and a half years ago, I wrote a story pointing out that Apple was actually the most profitable company operating in China, even including Chinese companies.
So in other words, the year I looked at, they had made $30 billion profit, operating profit in China, and that was double either Alibaba and double, it might have been Baidu.
Either way, it was making double the profit of the most successful Chinese tech companies.
The only companies that were doing a little bit better is, I think, from state-backed banks or something.
But in terms of like private sector, you know, tech companies, Apple is the biggest Chinese tech company.
I mean, it's a crazy thing to say.
So let's, for a moment, assume that China is a predatory and oppressive state.
It seems to have imperialist ambitions and it controls its population, you know, their opinions, their expressions of opinions.
And it obviously has its eye on replacing us as the prime financial mover in the world.
What would you do if you wanted to slow that down a little bit?
Especially, let's just take the case of Apple.
I mean, they can use this technology for all kinds of things, right?
For weapons, for any kind of electronic communications.
So we're essentially giving them the rope with which to hang us.
I do think it's a 21st century version of that.
I think it's probably above my pay grade to really get into the geopolitics of like, what's the solution here?
I really stop at Apple is stuck.
There's no place else that they can find the same combination of quality, quantity, cost than what they've done in China.
And even if they could, it's hard for them to move because they make $70 billion of revenue a year.
So exactly what the policy implications are, I'll leave to someone that has more of a geopolitical brain and a wider view because I'm looking pretty narrowly at Apple.
The only thing I would say is the book, I think, is probably less anti-Apple than a lot of people on social media seem to assume.
And I've spoken to a room full of ethnically Chinese people, none of whom are offended by the things that I say, because it is an authoritarian state.
I don't even think the Chinese communists would tell you that it's not an authoritarian state.
They would tell you that that's the model.
But I give great credit to the industrial policy, to the hardworkingness of their employees, to their long thinkingness about how this all works.
I think China sort of brilliantly played its long-term thinking against the short-termism of an American corporation.
So there's a host of things that are really quite positive about China in the book.
But realistically, you have to understand that they are a great adversary.
And I guess one more positive thing I say is that China found a way, this pre-Xi Jinping, it's maybe less true since he's come on board.
They found a way to introduce a certain dynamism on the public side of things.
In other words, when we think about bureaucrats in America, we're thinking about people slowing down growth because they're thinking about environment or, you know, they don't want to, I don't know, to build something here, there, everywhere for all sorts of issues.
China has bureaucrats that are more like a venture capitalist who like takes a cut of the equity, sits on your board and drives pro-growth policies.
And so they sort of evolved a certain new sense of capitalism that has really helped the nation do quite well.
And so I think if you're going into the book thinking, I'm going to learn about China being an evil empire or something.
Honestly, it's not really there.
I treat it as a fact that it's an authoritarian state and like a worthy opponent, let's say.
But it's not a diatribe.
It's not a screed against China.
No, no, no.
I didn't mean to say that, but all I was saying was if Tim Cook were to wake up one morning and think, you know what, really, you know, America should remain in its dominant position.
What would you do if you were in that situation?
Okay, so I'm a massive fan of friend shoring.
I think realistically, these jobs aren't coming back.
And even if you say, oh, let's just automate it all, there's a whole host of reasons why America is still not really prepared for that.
I mean, for instance, how much rare earth metals are being refined in the country?
I mean, virtually none.
So I'm a fan of the integrationist world, right?
I'm Pax Americana.
In other words, I think it was great that we played a hero role, let's say, in bringing up post-war Germany, post-war Japan, Taiwan, South Korea into thriving democracies.
We tried to do that with China.
Obviously, there was a strategic error, but I wouldn't want to throw out those lessons.
The problem is just that you tried to do this with a country that was authoritarian and was so big, it is so big, that they don't just want to participate in sort of cross-border industry.
They can dominate it.
And, you know, when we talk about China wanting to replace the U.S. or whatever, I mean, I don't want to live in a world where China can replace the U.S., but I don't really begrudge their motivation.
Me either.
I understand.
I don't want to do so.
You know, they're a big enough country that why would they want to fit into a paradigm set by a country whose population is one quarter of theirs?
It kind of makes sense.
Again, that does make me in favor of it, but realistically.
Well, exactly.
That's the thing.
But I would like to know if I'm Tim Cook, what would I do?
Yeah, so I mean, I wrote a master's thesis on the American military and grand strategy, and it was called Allies and Ideals.
And that gives you some answer as to maybe where I'm going with this.
In other words, in the 1980s, when the CIA and the Reagan administration were thinking, how do we go toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union, they sort of did an assessment of their own strategy and realized that, okay, we've got a more dynamic economy.
And so if we really focus on building up the military, the Soviet Union is going to try to respond and they will accelerate their own demise by doing so.
That's brilliant.
I think the problem with Republicans in particular today is that they're trying to do the same thing with a country that's three or four times larger that's been growing faster for four decades.
We will accelerate our own demise.
It's essentially the same thing, except we're the Soviets this time.
And so I think you instead need to do a different net assessment and realize what do we have that China doesn't have?
And that's where allies and ideals come from.
I mean, think about the fact that we have a border crisis.
What is a border crisis?
It's a border crisis because so many people want to live here because they love the values of the United States.
Think about the Soviet Union when they put a wall in Berlin.
It was to keep people in because people were fleeing, right?
We have an opposite problem.
So we need to be like highlighting the ideals of America rather and using them, you know, with with the integrationist world that I would support.
And then the so that's the ideals part.
The allies part is that we have all sorts of great trade treaties that we should be highlighting, you know, whether it's NATO or the five Eyes or what have you.
Border Crisis Values00:01:24
But I mean, if iPhones can be built in India, that is far superior to iPhones being built in China.
So I'm massively supportive of that.
So I'm really not a fan of Trump saying I don't want any of the iPhones being built in India.
It's really making a more difficult position for Apple.
It really puts them out of options.
And actually, if anything, it supports the status quo because if it's a 25%, if I'm Tim Cook and my latest thing is that Trump is putting 25% tariffs on the iPhone, I'm going to keep building them in China because the idea of building them in Pittsburgh is going to be a hell of a lot more than 25% premium.
Yeah.
The book is Apple in China, The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee.
Patrick, really interesting, interesting stuff.
And I hope you'll come back and talk again.
It's a terrific book.
And I know you're halfway through, and I got to tell you, it only gets better.
I've discovered all sorts of court documents that have never been reported on, and it's wild.
It's amazing stuff.
Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot, Pat.
Cheers, Andrew.
Again, really complex and dangerous.
One of the things about the Daily News is it makes everything seem so simple.
It is just not.
And I think Patrick is right that China is going to do China.
I really want to stop them, really oppose them, but you got to be smart about it.
And reading this book is one way to get a little smarter.
Apple and China, the capture of the world's greatest company.