cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34990039
In 2010, an elite unit of the Chinese police entered an Apple shop in Shanghai and violently assaulted the customers. The attack was so brutal that the floor tiles subsequently had to be replaced: they were too bloodstained. Those customers had been waiting in line for days for the latest iPhone; their crime was to refuse to leave upon learning that the shop had sold out of stock.
Yet no official record of this event exists. The shop’s cameras were cut and employees had their phones wiped. “It shows you how quickly the Chinese can brush everything under the carpet,” one person present tells journalist Patrick McGee. “It was like a mini-Tiananmen Square.” The incident is one small example in McGee’s eye-opening book, Apple in China, of how the Californian iPhone maker has “bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state”.
When people think of Apple’s presence in China, the focus tends either to be on the cheap manufacture of the company’s parts and the poor working conditions at those factories, or on the censorship of content on Apple devices inside the country. McGee, a journalist at the Financial Times, breaks down in much greater detail the relationship between this capitalist company and communist nation – a relationship so intertwined and complex that it will take decades to unravel. He makes the argument that not only has China effectively made Apple what it is today, but the reverse is also true. “China wouldn’t be China today without Apple,” McGee writes. “[Apple’s] investments in the country have been spectacular, rivalling nation-building efforts.”
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The more Apple invests in both training these [Chinese] contracted factory workers and paying for special machinery that could only be used for its products – in 2018 the value of Apple’s “long-lived assets” in China peaked at $13.3 billion – the more it becomes bound to the country. [Apple contractor's] Foxconn hubs, for example, are now surrounded by hundreds of sub-suppliers that cater to Apple’s every whim. “Anything we wanted, we could get it,” one engineer recalls. “Whatever we needed, it would happen.”
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Apple is notoriously secretive, but McGee proffers dozens of first-hand accounts of how the company essentially bumbled its way into becoming hooked on China. By the time Apple executives realise that the Chinese president Xi Jinping is ramping up repression at home and taking a more combative stance in international affairs, it’s too late to untangle the relationship: those business ties, McGee writes, are “unbreakable”. In 2016, when the Chinese authorities make it clear that they can remove, whenever they want, the cheap and plentiful labour on which Apple relies, Cook is compelled to make a trip to the Chinese Communist Party headquarters. The company pledges to invest $275 billion in China over the next five years. It does not, unsurprisingly, announce this investment to the Western press.
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@Hotznplotzn that’s extremely bad indeed! However; if the President of the United States organises a manhunt against the chief prosecutor of the ICC, where can Apple go for a non-brutal regime? Don’t forget that the current prime minister of India, democratic chosen, just like a president of United States, is involved in a scandal revolving around the massacre of more than 1000 people too.
The best options - regime wise - are also the most expensive ones.
Downvote for the next whataboutism.
Are you sure that’s what they’re trying to do?
I often see people waving away the incremental enshittification of social systems in my country by saying “at least it’s not like the U.S.” but to me that’s burying the bar.
China and the USA are both run by nasty regimes, they suck in different ways (albeit increasingly less so), but you couldn’t pay me to live in either place.
Apples to oranges, but since they’re both rotted what virtue is there in accepting either one?
This is not about "China vs USA". The US (or the EU, or any other continent, bloc, and country) has nothing to do with this issue, may it "suck" or not.
There is a good video documentary. It is from 2021, but still very accurate and worth watching.
How Tim Cook Surrendered Apple to the Chinese Government -- (Invidious link)
(Here is the original YT link to the video.)
[Edit typo and for clarity.]
Aaah, okay I see! Sadly this goes for pretty much all companies. It's an inherent problem in capitalism. Money matters more than lives, so a company will happily throw people into a meat grinder if that's going to pad their bottom line.
There are no good corporations.