Patrick McGee

That's what I would love to see.

So Apple in China, the capture of the world's greatest company is like a 400 page narrative that really spells out how the world's greatest company built the world's most sophisticated supply chain, but in the process made the rookie and amateur mistake of putting all its eggs in one basket.

just as that basket became a surveillance state.

That sounds deep and heavy, and yet I have to say it's a really fun book.

It's like this rah-rah-go-Apple narrative in the early chapters because, you know, they're experimenting in Mexico and in Taiwan, in Wales, in the Czech Republic, trying to build their computers, and they slowly get lured over to China where things just get better and better and better.

Thanks, Lynn.

Thrilled to be here.

Yeah, cheap labor is certainly a part of it.

I would say it's baked into the cake.

It was far more that there was like a certain dynamism.

You had this forceful state that was deploying what was at the time the world's largest population.

And yes, they had low wages, but it was more that they could move around.

So within China, you have something called the floating population, which is essentially these rural migrants who go to places like Shenzhen, right, this special economic zone that just grows like wildfire.

And it grows so quickly because China has a specific industrial policy to lure in foreign expertise, foreign capital.

People forget how poor China was when Mao had died in 1976.

And so there's this will to power that China wants to achieve.

And they're going to do it through manufacturing, but they don't have their own capital.

They need to rely on, at first, the Chinese diaspora, Hong Kong, later Taiwan, and then later the Japanese through Panasonic and then the Americans.

And so Apple sort of fits into this role where they realize that as their suppliers move

They can move more and more of their operations there.