In an extensive paywalled report based on interviews and purported internal Apple documents, The Information revealed that Tim Cook personally forged a five-year agreement with the Chinese government during a series of in-person visits to the country in 2016. The need to push for a closer alliance with the Chinese government reportedly came from a number of Apple executives who were concerned about bad publicity in China and the company’s poor relationship with Chinese officials, who believed that Apple was not contributing enough to the local economy.
Alleged internal documents show that Cook “personally lobbied officials” in China over threats made against Apple Pay, iCloud, and the App Store. Cook set out to use a “memorandum of understanding” between Apple and a powerful Chinese government agency called the National Development and Reform Commission to formally agree to a number of concessions in return for regulatory exemptions. The 1,250-word agreement was written by Apple’s government affairs team in China and stewarded by Cook as he met with Chinese officials.
It was already well-known that Tim Cook and Apple were closely cooperating with the Chinese regime, but it seems they even went as far as begging and groveling to work with the Chinese regime in incredibly close ways. Mind you, that same regime Apple is so keen to closely cooperate with and please is currently executing a genocide to ethnically cleanse China.
I’ve heard all the spineless corporatist excuses a million times. “Apple is just following Chinese law!” No. “Vote with your wallet!” No. “It’s not illegal so who cares if they aid a genocidal regime!” No. We throw minorities in jail for carrying a few grams of drugs, but we let corporations and executives who plot and scheme with genocidal regimes run free. Is that justice?
We have devolved into a society where we just accept this – and that worries me just as much as all the other existential threats we’re facing.
Reminds me of HSBC providing services to drug cartels, and actively helping them avoid US scrutiny by giving them consultations.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-examines-hsbcs-881-million-money-laundering-scandal-2018-02-21
This part is interesting:
Too big to fail = too big to prosecute…
sukru,
Business as usual, methinks.
You make some valid points Thom, but it still seems naive to think that it even matters. Corporations and their executives are rarely if ever held accountable for such things.
Alfman,
I see the big CEOs as Dukes and Duchesses of the modern era. The King’s hold over them is not as absolute as other subjects.
But my bigger concern is when the “title” is not earned by merit. Someone like Bill Gates who did transformative work, might be excused to a degree. (But was still held to account by the Congress back in the day).
On the other hand, someone who “inherited” their position, and abusing it to harm to society would be an entirely different story.
(This is very much less than ideal of course).
sukru,
Yeah, capitalism definitely produces a similar hierarchy.
Gate’s work was transformative, but he had the privilege of starting out wealthy. How do you fairly determine merit when some individuals start the race past the finish line? In terms of pulling oneself up from their own bootstraps I think Jobs is a better example, but then he was a really dishonest partner who exploited Wozniak’s trust.
I can’t think of anyone like that *cough* *trump*, *cough*.
“seems naive to think that it even matters”
It matters, let’s not normalize it.
I think Tim Apple is trying to make us Think Different about Steve Jobs.
Would be interesting to see what he would do if China decided LGBT should be treated like Uighurs.
This is the problem with corporations getting political. They signal all they want, until it comes to the bottom line. Then they signal even louder while they do the opposite, and people are crazy enough to believe the words and not the actions. What would Tim Cook do in that instance? Exactly what he is doing now and has been doing for years. Yet, if this were to happen, people would act surprised and scream about it until the next “big trendy issue” came up and it would promptly be forgotten.
Google was smart enough to get out of China back in 2010.
Not by itself.
Don’t you think they could have made a similar deal like apple if they wanted and be still there?
No, remember what happened at that moment. And why Alphabet was created.
China wanted full control of their own network, it could only compete with Google.
Apple have little opponent in China. Perhaps Huawei, but for now, China deals with it.
It’s different. With Apple they only have to ban certain apps and have the user data for Chinese citizens in Chinese servers. Censoring Google is more difficult because Google doesn’t create most of its content.
Let’s be honest here, no Big Tech CEO can afford to exit a market of 1 billion people and remain CEO. Not even a charismatic, he-built-the-company kind of CEO like Eric Schmidt, much less Tim Cook who is living in the shadow of the late Steve Jobs and is getting flack for letting software quality slide during his leadership.
So no, you shouldn’t be surprised. Also, you will need to recruit a force of 1 billion wallets before you even begin competing with China, and they’d better be pretty strong wallets because Apple devices are a status symbol in China and Chinese people spend a lot of money on Apple devices.
So, the only real option is government sanctions. Regimes like China or Iran like to pretend sanctions don’t work while simultaneously denouncing them precisely because they work. In other words, Trump’s China sanctions were a good thing, even if you don’t like Trump’s other policies.
Also, I wish those self-righteous liberals and leftists over here in the West boycotted Apple in order to reward Google’s (and ex-CEO’s Eric Schmidt) decision to leave China. But that would require accountability on their part (instead of asking it from others) and personal inconvenience, so it’s clearly out of the question.
PS: All my current phones run Android and made either in Taiwan or South Korea. Never owned an iPhone.
kurkosdr,
You’re talking specifically about the taxes the trump administration imposed on China, Canada, Mexico, South Korean, India, and Europe? You know those taxes are technically paid for by US companies who then pass the price increases onto consumers? Furthermore the retaliatory tariffs did a lot of damage to US farmers in particular (our main export) that lead to produce rotting in fields leading to US government paying farmer’s to cover their losses.
The thing about trade wars is that everyone looses. Sure it does hurt china, but at the same time it also hurts us and our other trading partners as well. To the extent that you believe in taxing imports, ok but you still need a plan to build up manufacturing back home. Trump had no plan. Also if your going to pass national import taxes it should be for finished products. Taxing raw materials like the 25% steel import tax was kind of counter productive because it hurt our own manufacturers while increasing the supply of cheap steel to foreign competitors making them even more competitive.
The biggest of ironies is that while US companies had to raise their prices to pay the new US import taxes, End consumers buying direct from china off of ebay and alibaba haven’t had to pay those taxes because their orders are beneath the minimums and it’s impractically expensive to enforce tariffs on every small item arriving at ports. So these taxes hurt US retailers far more than Chinese ones.
So IMHO import taxes need to be used sparingly with great consideration for pragmatic reality and consequences like inflation and retaliation. To be clear, I’m not happy that so much of our manufacturing has gone to China, but I don’t think many economists believe that tariffs work. Domestic manufacturing is largely dead and we’ll need more than taxes to fix it. We need real plans to rebuild thriving industries here. While I doubt “build back better” is enough, it seems better than just throwing taxes at the problem and hoping our industries fix themselves. We should be world leaders in solar for example, we have no excuse not to be, but we’re left playing catch up because washington took the side of big oil instead.
I really want new independent leadership because I think our two dominant parties have failed us. They’re way too focused on political division than working together solving problems. We can do so much better if we come together, but it seems the extreme factions on both the left and right are each setting a narrative that makes the middle ground impossible. Good/reasonable politicians are retiring at an alarming rate and that leaves the country to be run by extremists, which is scary.
The Trump sanctions broke the legs of Huawei (preventing Huawei phones from surpassing Apple and Samsung phones in sales as predicted) and this did hurt China even if they won’t admit it. And it set a nice precedent that can be re-applied by an future US president against any Chinese company that relies on foreign technology (which is most of Chinese tech companies for the foreseeable future).
You don’t have to like Trump and there are reasons to not like him or his presidency, but this is a fact.
kurkosdr,
You should be more specific then that corporate sanctions are what you meant when you said government sanctions. Consider the difference between sanctioning the country of Israel versus an Israeli firm…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/03/pegasus-nso-entity-list-spyware/
Perhaps it seems subtle, but it’s a difference that shouldn’t be glossed over IMHO.
To be pedantic though, yes the fact that administrations can apply sanctions to foreign companies and/or countries is a fact, but technically whether one should or not is only an opinion. I was never particularly invested in Huawei, and therefor banning had far less of an impact on me than the tariffs, But the thing is if we’re honest, our own government is guilty of many of the same things we accuse China/Huawei of…I’d far rather be in a democracy than the authoritarian police state that is China, but nevertheless our own hypocrisy and our own unconstitutional surveillance programs are a stain on democracy, which is disappointing at least to me. They would be justified in banning our companies and tech under the same logic that we’ve banned theirs.
“I’d far rather be in a democracy than the authoritarian police state that is China,”
Honestly, looking in from Europe I get the impression US isn’t much better than China as you also pointed out. What is worse, it doesn’t seem the US is improving or maybe the next trump administration* will be worse still.
* which is possible, the Democrats aren’t popular on their own and trump is probably still the most popular candidate on the other side. Biden was in large part an anti-trump vote and it’s possible Biden can’t run again (and his popularity has slipped.
Lennie,
I am extremely worried about the future of our democracy. Ordinarily I don’t want to give cart blanche to the democrats and I think it’s important to have balance. However that one of our two mainstream parties is actually siding with authoritarianism is absolutely terrifying. There can no longer be a doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that unchecked, trump’s tendencies would lead us into fascism. Trump failed his first term, but only because there were people willing and able to stand up to him.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
The problem going forward is that many conscientious republican politicians who took a stand are either retiring or are being subjected to litmus tests where those who will not pledge loyalty to trump and his mission to overthrow democratic elections are themselves being replaced by new trump loyalists who don’t care about integrity.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/12/liz-cheney-republican-party-trump
It’ll only be a matter of time before republicans win the whitehouse and history suggests it will be sooner rather than later. Republicans will likely control congress and the ranks are loaded with yes-men. They “stolen” a seat on the supreme court, if they take the next whitehouse race they have a good chance of getting a 7-2 supreme court majority.
I worry what could happen if we get a putin-like dictator in office and our institutions of checks and balances are crippled unable to fend off fascism. I hope this doesn’t happen, but how close we actually are to this now is alarming.
I don’t always agree with Thom on political issues, but this time: spot on! It’s a shame that our economic system works in favour of big companies working closely with genocidal dictatorships. I don’t really see a way how this could be changed but that’s still no reason to find excuses for this kind of behaviour.
The American Nazi movement was quite strong until the US entered WWII. An American friend recommends watching PBS channel “The American Experience” and the shows: biography of Jesse Owens (Season 24, Episode 9), America and the Holocaust (Season 6, Episode 7), The Abolitionists (Season 25, Episodes 1-3), The Great War (Season 29, Episodes 8-10). Mentioning no names a small note is many on social media believe a certain frog faced anti-EU former politician and far right wing media mouthpiece would have been banged up if he had been alive during WWII.
One peculiarity of repressed protected categories and something I have noticed in both the US and UK is some can be so eager for approval they go out of their way to prove they are “one of the boys” even if this results in some denial of their own identity. I’ve never regarded Tim Cook as anything more than an unimaginative don’t rock the boat type who has bursts of over-compensating.I forget their names but the pair who started the George Soros conspiracy were actually American marketers who were Jewish themselves. Zuckerberg who sociopathically and recklessly allowed or encouraged Facebook to become a cesspit of far right activity is also Jewish. Maybe it’s an American thing but I cannot for the life of fathom this level of stupidity and self harm.
Unlike some who have a dogmatic view that business exists to extract maximum profit my view is there is no legal requirement for this (there isn’t) nor is it socially responsible (it’s not). I can and have spoken up when CEO’s tried to ram through “unanimous decisions” in meetings and I dissented. I also turn down business I don’t feel is appropriate. I also know I am not the only person who has these views.
Signing secret deals, if this turns out to be true, goes far and away above following the Chinese law. Yes, they do have to follow it, just as they have to follow U.S or EU law, at least in theory. That’s not corporatist, that’s reality. But signing an under-the-table deal with another regime should have been a red flag from the start. That usually doesn’t mean they’re following the law, but rather that they’re working out a private exception to it.
On the other hand, it’s not up to any corporate entities to say what China should and should not do. We’ve seen the disastrous consequences of corporations getting political over here, and it sure isn’t a pretty sight even just for domestic issues.
Now, for my personal stance, not objective. If I were in charge of Apple, I’d pull the bloody hell out of China. Factories, suppliers, retail outlets, you name it. Gone. And I’d take the hit to my bottom line for it, and I would do it because China’s laws are laws I could not personally force anyone to follow and still sleep at night. If I had control of our government, I’d do the same and more. But I guess that’s why I’ve never risen that far. I’m not dishonest enough to do it.
From a society that once freaked out with a Sony audio cd rootkit, to one that simple accept that a corporation spy on every aspect of everybody’s life, and like Apple, hand over all user data to authoritarian regimes shameless if that affect the bottom line.
We are doomed. Now we have the tech to create the single most powerful totalitarian regime that ever existed, one that goes beyond even scifi novels of the past and would put even East German to shame… and we are simple empowering some of the worst regimes on earth with it for thirty pieces of silver.
Stop this nonsense. There’s always been a divide between “our business” and “their business”. Maybe our circles have grown a bit in recent decades but that is not devolution.
And: for example the USA has been funding wars and torture and killing globally probably close to a hundred years and I don’t hear you whine about them. But those pesky Chinks! They’re the REAL evil!
One have also to account for the fact that those corps transgressions happen abroad. The US govt goes only so far in prosecuting corps doing harm to non-americans esp. if they bring a handsome buck back.
Having said that the US govt should not be surprised that people in charge in Columbia and Mexico are kind of lenient to drug lords flooding US with their produce while keep large parts of population afloat financially.
Apple is a business and business has to go on.
A separate topic since you linked to human rights article: Do you criticize non secular Islamic countries all around the world that persecute people all the time? Europe and most Asia are already suffering from it. Middle east is a hell hole. In America, they are increasing population until they can exert control. This religion has no respect for women or other religions. They persecute openly and kill freely. China is doing the right thing to safeguard it’s future from radical teachings of Islam.