Patrick McGee

for the smartphone, which is the world's most iconic product for the 21st century.

And then, of course, they also took those skill sets and they developed other things.

So, you know, what's an electric vehicle?

It's a smartphone on wheels.

What's a drone?

It's a smartphone with propellers.

Basically, if you could master the sort of like glass, ceramics, the camera, the battery, all the things that go into a smartphone, you're being equipped with skill sets that are necessary for like any number of other industries that basically define our era.

So I really hold no blame whatsoever for anyone at Apple who moved to China.

I think back then it wasn't just bipartisan.

Arguably, it was the entire American worldview that we sort of had figured out where like human society was going.

You know, think of Francis Fukuyama.

Charles Krauthammer would have made this argument as well, that a sort of small L liberal capitalism was the way that all societies were going to go.

And for a certain period, if American companies were investing in other countries, you were basically accelerating their pathway to get there.

So what really changed is that in the late 90s and early 2000s, people forget, but Apple was almost bankrupt in 96, 97, and again after the dot-com crisis in 2000.

They really moved to outsourcing and offshoring because of financial desperation.

What really changes is in late 2012, early 2013, when Xi Jinping comes in.

And this is a period in which Apple experiences its political awakening.

It has cracked the Chinese market both as a retail giant and as an operator.

And yet it knows surprisingly little in 2013 about Chinese politics, about Chinese culture.

Once Xi Jinping comes in, and this is the prologue to my book, Apple is basically attacked on the second day of his presidency.