Patrick McGee is a longtime Financial Times journalist who has reported from Hong Kong, Germany, and California, covering Apple, digital advertising, EVs, and more. His award-winning work has appeared in leading outlets worldwide, and his debut book, Apple in China, draws on 200+ interviews to reveal how Apple’s deep entanglement with China reshaped its future and U.S.–China relations.
Follow Patrick McGee here and order his book - Apple in China here
I just had one of those conversations that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about how the world works. Patrick McGee joined me on the podcast to talk about his new book, Apple in China, and what I walked away with isn’t just a story about iPhones or supply chains—it’s a story about power, leverage, and the stakes of national strategy.
Patrick’s reporting is sharp, clear, and relentless. Apple and Beijing are aligned in ways most people don’t see—but for completely different reasons. Apple optimizes for scale, efficiency, and profits. Beijing optimizes for security, sovereignty, and industrial dominance. And the tension between those goals is becoming unsustainable.
The book is called Apple in China, but the truth is that China is in Apple. The company didn’t merely outsource production. It colonized its suppliers. Engineers unbolted high-end machinery from Foxconn factory floors and trucked it away when the factory tried to push back. Apple literally owned the leverage. They understood supplier cost structures better than the suppliers themselves. One supplier put it bluntly:
"Working with Apple is really f**ing hard. But we learned more than with anyone else."
Apple was the prom queen: stunning to look at, terrifying to date. Suppliers kept coming back—not for the margins, but for knowledge. Apple trained them, squeezed them, and created an industrial ecosystem that reshaped global manufacturing.
Meanwhile, China had a different playbook. Under Xi, the CCP treats foreign firms like Apple and Tesla as reverse Trojan horses, not just for technology but for tacit knowledge: how to produce, distribute, communicate, and consume. This is “reform and opening” with Chinese characteristics: lure in foreign capital, reverse-engineer the product, replicate the playbook, and eventually replace the originator. The first machine is imported, the second made in China, the third exported. Apple and then later Tesla dominated only because they accelerated the rise of national champions. Trade in ideas, not commodities, builds empires—and Apple in China shows exactly how that process unfolded in real time.
This isn’t just a story about a company. It’s a civilizational wager: that cheap iPhones and higher margins were worth losing manufacturing competitiveness—and maybe the future.
Patrick and I talked about the catfish effect: Norwegian fishermen kept sardines alive by tossing in a catfish to force them to swim faster. Tesla in China didn’t just act as the catfish—it taught the whole tank to swim, much like Apple did for smartphones. Patrick was clear:
Tesla didn’t just compete—it trained its suppliers.
It imported Apple’s playbook: quality over cost-cutting.
It staffed up with Apple veterans who knew how to navigate bureaucracy and build ecosystems.
And in just 12 months, it stood up a Shanghai Gigafactory that leveled up the entire supply chain.
This reminded me Safi Bahcall’s book Loonshots that speaks of Vannevar Bush in 1940. With Europe collapsing under the Nazi war machine, and the U.S. needing rapid military modernization, Bush set a single North Star—win the war—and empowered decentralized teams of scientists and military personnel to innovate. Radar and sonar breakthroughs followed in years, not decades.
China is doing something similar today. Clear national priorities, decentralized execution. Foreign firms provide tacit knowledge. Local governments and companies absorb it. The result: industrial modernization at unprecedented speed.
Patrick’s reporting, combined with insights from Safi Bahcall’s Loonshots, underlines a lesson that resonates far beyond China or Apple: strategic alignment matters. Clear goals, aligned execution, and empowered teams produce extraordinary outcomes. Without them, even the best talent flounders.
It also illustrates how multi-year or multi-decade national industrial strategy leverages short term earnings priorities of companies to its own advantages. Apple won the quarter-on-quarter earnings growth game—but at the cost of long-term leverage over its supply chain. Beijing, meanwhile, is playing the long game, and increasingly winning big time.
If you care about tech, policy, or how global power really works, read this book. After Apple in China, you’ll never look at “Designed in California. Assembled in China.” the same way again.
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