APPLE IN CHINA: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, by Patrick McGee

《苹果在中国——捕获世界上最伟大的公司》(Apple In China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company)，帕特里克·麦基著

A little more than a decade ago, foreign journalists living in Beijing, including myself, met for a long chat with a top Chinese diplomat. Those were different days, when high-ranking Chinese officials were still meeting with members of the Western press corps. The diplomat whom we met was charming, funny, fluent in English. She also had the latest iPhone in front of her on the table.

十多年前，包括我在内的一些驻北京外国记者与一位中国高级外交官进行了一次长谈。那是一个不同的时代，当时中国高官还在会见西方记者团成员。我们遇到的那位外交官迷人、风趣、英语流利。她面前的桌子上还有一部最新款的iPhone。

I noticed the Apple gadget because at the time, Chinese state news media were unleashing invectives on the Cupertino, Calif.-based company for supposedly cheating Chinese consumers. (It wasn’t true.) There were rumors circulating that Chinese government officials were being told not to flaunt American status symbols. The diplomat’s accouterment proved that wrong.

我之所以注意到这款苹果产品，是因为当时中国官方新闻媒体正在猛烈抨击这家总部位于加州库比蒂诺的公司，称其欺骗中国消费者。（事实并非如此。）有传言说，中国政府官员被告知不要炫耀那些美国的身份象征。这位外交官的装备证明，这个传言是错误的。

At the time, one could make the argument that China’s economic modernization was being accompanied by a parallel, if somewhat more laggardly, political reform. But the advent in 2012 of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader who has consolidated power and re-established the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party, has shattered those hopes. And, as Patrick McGee makes devastatingly clear in his smart and comprehensive “Apple in China,” the American company’s decision under Tim Cook, the current C.E.O., to manufacture about 90 percent of its products in China has created an existential vulnerability not just for Apple, but for the United States — nurturing the conditions for Chinese technology to outpace American innovation.

当时的中国可以说是经济现代化伴随着政治改革的同步进行，尽管后者有些滞后。但是，2012年，中国领导人习近平的出现打破了这些希望，他巩固了权力，重新确立了中国共产党至高无上的地位。而且，正如帕特里克·麦基在他睿智而全面的《苹果在中国》一书中明确的那样，苹果这家美国公司在现任首席执行官蒂姆·库克执掌下决定在中国生产约90%的产品，不仅给苹果公司也给美国带来了关乎存亡的脆弱性——同时为中国技术超越美国创新创造了条件。

McGee, who was the lead Apple reporter for The Financial Times and previously covered Asian markets from Hong Kong, takes what we instinctively know — “how Apple used China as a base from which to become the world’s most valuable company, and in doing so, bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state” — and comes up with a startling conclusion, backed by meticulous reporting: “that China wouldn’t be China today without Apple.”

麦基曾是《金融时报》报道苹果的首席记者，之前曾在香港报道过亚洲市场，他从我们直觉上认识到的事实出发——“苹果如何利用中国作为基地成为世界上最有价值的公司，并在此过程中将其未来不可避免地与一个无情的威权国家联系在一起”，以细致的报道为据，得出了一个惊人的结论：“如果没有苹果，中国就不会是今天的中国。”

Apple says that it has trained more than 28 million workers in China since 2008, which McGee notes is larger than the entire labor force of California. The company’s annual investment in China — not even counting the value of hardware, “which would more than double the figure,” McGee writes — exceeds the total amount the Biden administration dedicated for a “once-in-a-generation” initiative to boost American computer chip production.

苹果公司表示，自2008年以来，该公司已在中国培训了2800多万名工人，麦基指出，这个数字比加州的全部劳动力还要多。该公司在中国一年的投资就超过了拜登政府为促进美国计算机芯片生产而投入的“一代人只能遇到一次”的计划的总额——这甚至还不包括硬件的价值，麦基在书中称，把这部分算进去“这个数字要翻一倍以上”。

“This rapid consolidation reflects a transfer of technology and know-how so consequential,” McGee writes, “as to constitute a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

“这种快速的整合反映了技术和知识的转移是如此重要，”麦基写道，“以至于构成了一个地缘政治事件，就像柏林墙的倒塌一样。”

McGee has a journalist’s knack for developing scenes with a few curated details, and he organizes his narrative chronologically, starting with Apple’s origins as a renegade upstart under Steve Jobs in the 1970s and ’80s. After Jobs’s firing and rehiring comes a corporate mind shift in which a vertically integrated firm falls for the allure of contract manufacturing, sending its engineers abroad to train low-paid workers in how to churn out ever more complicated electronics.

麦基有记者的技巧，可以用一些精心安排的细节来展现场景，他按时间顺序组织叙事，从20世纪七八十年代史蒂夫·乔布斯领导下的苹果作为一个叛逆新贵的起源说起。在乔布斯被解雇和重新聘用之后，企业思想发生了转变，一家纵向一体化的公司被外包制造的诱惑所吸引，将其工程师派往国外培训低薪工人，教他们如何大量生产更复杂的电子产品。

We only really get to Apple in China about 90 pages into the book, and that China, in the mid- to late 1990s, was mainly attractive because of what one China scholar called “low wages, low welfare and low human rights.” McGee relates how one Apple engineer, visiting suppliers in the southern Chinese manufacturing center of Shenzhen, was horrified that there were no elevators in the “slapdash” facility, and that the stairs were built with troubling irregularity: with, say, 12 steps (of varying heights) between the first and second floors, then 18 to the next, then 16, then 24.

本书进行到90页左右才真正开始谈及苹果在中国的情况。在20世纪90年代中后期，中国之所以具有吸引力，主要是因为一位中国学者所说的“低工资、低福利和低人权”。麦基讲述了一名苹果工程师拜访中国南方制造中心深圳的供应商时，震惊地发现这家“简陋”的工厂里没有电梯，楼梯的建造也很不规范，令人不安：比如，一楼和二楼之间有12级台阶（高度不一），然后是18级，然后是16级，然后是24级。

But China at the turn of the millennium was in the process of joining the World Trade Organization, and its leaders were banking on an export-led economy that would learn from foreign investors. Starting in the 2000s the Taiwanese mega-supplier Foxconn constructed entire settlements for Chinese workers building Apple electronics. First up on the new assembly lines were iMacs that were produced by what became known as “China speed.”

但在世纪之交，中国正处于加入世界贸易组织的过程中，中国领导人寄望于出口导向型经济，向外国投资者学习。从本世纪头十年开始，台湾大型供应商富士康为生产苹果电子产品的中国工人建造了一整套居住区。新装配线上的第一批产品是用所谓“中国速度”制造的iMac。

Less than 15 years after Chinese workers began making Apple products en masse, Chinese consumers were buying them en masse, too. Covering China at the time, I chafed at the popular narrative that reduced Apple’s presence in China to a tale of downtrodden workers at Foxconn and other suppliers. Yes, there were nets outside factory dorms to prevent suicides; and wages remained low. Even Apple admitted to alarming labor abuses in its Chinese supply chain.

在中国工人开始大量生产苹果产品不到15年后，中国消费者也开始大量购买苹果产品。我当时在报道中国，对将苹果在中国的存在简化为富士康和其他供应商工人受压榨的流行叙事感到不满。是的，富士康工厂宿舍外面有防自杀的安全网；工资仍然很低。就连苹果也承认，其在中国的供应链存在令人担忧的滥用劳工行为。

But that was only half the story. The iPhone in China signified success, an individualistic, American-accented flavor that seemed to delight both veteran diplomats and Foxconn workers I got to know in southwest China. Those of us who had lived in China for years could see that life was getting freer and richer for most Chinese. By the mid-2010s, it was the United States that seemed behind in terms of integrating apps into daily life. In China, at least in the big cities, we were already living in the tech future.

但这只是故事的一半。苹果手机在中国象征着成功，有一种个人主义的、美国式的味道，这似乎让那位资深外交官和我开始在中国西南结识的富士康工人都很高兴。我们这些在中国生活多年的人可以看到，对大多数中国人来说，生活变得越来越自由和富裕。到2010年代中期，在将手机应用融入日常生活方面，美国似乎落后了。在中国，至少在大城市，我们已经生活在科技的未来。

Yet there were episodes of unease. After Xi came to power, state media campaigns targeted Apple’s Western “arrogance.” Apple acquiesced to Beijing’s demands that it remove the New York Times app from its online store in China and keep Chinese user data in China rather than the United States, prompting worries about government intrusion. As Xi cracked down on labor rights activism, more independent audits of the Apple supply chain ceased.

但也有令人不安的时刻。习近平上台后，官方媒体针对苹果公司的西方“傲慢”进行宣传。苹果公司默许了中国政府的要求，将《纽约时报》的应用程序从中国的在线商店下架，并将中国用户的数据保存在中国而不是美国，这引发了对政府侵犯的担忧。随着习近平打击劳工权益活动，对苹果供应链的更多独立审计也停止了。

In 2015, Apple was the largest corporate investor in China, to the tune of about $55 billion a year, according to internal documents McGee obtained for this book. (Cook himself told the Chinese media that the company had created nearly five million jobs there: “I’m not sure there are too many companies, domestic or foreign, who can say that.”) At the same time, Xi laid out “Made in China 2025,” his blueprint for achieving technological self-sufficiency in the next decade, dependent on Apple being what McGee calls “a mass enabler of ‘Indigenous innovation.’”

根据麦吉为撰写本书获得的内部文件，2015年，苹果是中国最大的企业投资者，每年的投资总额约为550亿美元。（库克本人告诉中国媒体，苹果在中国创造了近500万个就业岗位：“我不确定有多少国内或国外公司能说出这样的话。”）与此同时，习近平制定了“中国制造2025”计划，那是他在未来十年实现技术自给自足的蓝图，它的实施有赖于苹果——麦基称其为“‘自主创新’的重大推动者”。

“As Apple taught the supply chain how to perfect multi-touch glass and make the thousand components within the iPhone,” he writes, “Apple’s suppliers took what they knew and offered it to homegrown companies led by Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo.” Today, some of these premium products come with specs that are increasingly ahead of American design, and have outsold Apple in many major markets.

他写道：“苹果教会了供应链如何完善多点触控玻璃，如何制造iPhone的上千个部件，而苹果的供应商则把他们所知道的提供给以华为、小米、Vivo和Oppo为首的本土公司。”如今，其中一些高端产品的规格越来越领先于美国的设计，在许多主要市场的销量都超过了苹果。

Sometimes, McGee is too comprehensive. He draws interesting portraits of characters who disappear after a few paragraphs. We do not need to know the full name of the law firm that Apple hired in preparation for a possible bankruptcy in the mid-1990s or even the minutiae of pre-China personnel wrangles, especially when centuries of Chinese history are compressed to less than a page. There are a few Chinese misspellings and miscues — the surname Wang is not, in fact, pronounced quite as “Wong.” And it would have been nice to have gotten more perspectives of Chinese people.

有时麦基太过讲求全面。他勾勒了一些有趣的人物肖像，但这些人物在几段之后就消失了。我们不需要知道上世纪90年代中期苹果因为可能破产而聘请的那家律师事务所的全名，甚至不需要知道苹果进入中国之前的人事纠纷细节，尤其是当几个世纪的中国历史只被压缩到不到一页纸的篇幅。书中有一些中文拼写错误和偏差——事实上，王姓的发音并不是“Wong”。如果能有更多中国人的视角就更好了。

But these are quibbles with an otherwise persuasive exposé of the trillion-dollar company’s uncomfortably close relationship with the global power. China may have enabled Apple to become one of the most profitable companies in the world, but the exploitation goes both ways: This is not just a story of China making Apple, but of Apple making China. Given Xi’s authoritarian hold on power, what began as a feat of manufacturing has troubling consequences for the entire world.

但这些都是对这部极具说服力的作品的吹毛求疵，它揭露了这家价值数万亿美元的公司与一个全球大国之间令人不安的密切关系。中国可能使苹果成为世界上最赚钱的公司之一，但这种利用是双向的：这不仅仅是中国制造苹果的故事，也是苹果制造中国的故事。考虑到习近平的威权统治，这一制造业的巨大成就给整个世界带来了令人担忧的后果。

APPLE IN CHINA: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company | By Patrick McGee | Scribner | 437 pp. | $32

《苹果在中国：捕获世界上最伟大的公司》| 作者：帕特里克·麦基 | Scribner出版社 | 437页 | 32美元