Patrick McGee

The quid pro quo was that he was going to build these enormous campuses where he was literally employing hundreds of thousands of local Chinese people.

Apple wasn't necessarily involved in really any of those negotiations and didn't have all the political and cultural wherewithal to drive those negotiations, but Foxconn had done it for them.

In 2013, when Apple has this like wake up moment where they're basically attacked on a major television show seen by millions, if not tens of millions of people, it's when they realize they need to take ownership of those relationships.

Otherwise, they fear being blacklisted in the country.

They were accused of treating the Chinese people in an inferior way by not having the same warranty policy.

There had actually been, as part of the TV show, footage of someone returning an iPhone in Paris and then someone returning an iPhone in China.

And the customer is just being treated differently.

And there's complicated reasons why that was actually true.

But that was the allegation.

Apple basically just said, what are you talking about?

Our policies are the same everywhere.

And they sort of wrote this benign statement.

And then they signed it off by saying in an offhanded way, Apple makes incomparable products, something like that.

And the big editorial in the People's Daily, you can think of that as like state-sponsored New York Times for the country, sort of riffed off of that statement and derided Apple for its incomparable arrogance instead.

And that, I think, is the moment when Apple realizes, oh, our statement didn't do very well.

This isn't going to go over the way we think it is.

And in fact, the iPhone had really stalled.

People stopped going to the stores during this time.

And that's when Tim Cook issues an apology in Mandarin on the Apple China website.

And that would be the first real reportable concession on the part of Apple of there's a political awakening taking place.