Apple in China: Financial Times’ Patrick McGee on Tim Cook, Scale, and Risk

Apple’s success in China is more complicated—and consequential—than most realize.
In this episode, Peter High speaks with Financial Times journalist and author Patrick McGee, who covered Apple for years and recently published Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Patrick’s reporting reveals how Apple became deeply intertwined with China’s manufacturing and political landscape, why the company’s investment strategy mirrors the scale of the Marshall Plan, and what it means for America’s technological and geopolitical future.

Patrick explains how Apple trained tens of millions of Chinese workers, enabled critical industrial know-how, and inadvertently supported the rise of China’s tech and military capabilities. He also discusses the internal tensions between product design and supply chain mastery, Tim Cook’s evolution as a CEO, and the risks of Apple’s continued dependence on a single nation for its most critical operations.

Key insights include:

• The little-known “Gang of Eight” and Apple’s in-China-for-China strategy
• Why Apple’s $275B China deal dwarfs U.S. tech investments like the CHIPS Act
• How Apple’s success helped catalyze Huawei’s resurgence and HarmonyOS
• The supply chain realities that make shifting manufacturing nearly impossible