Apple is a huge company, selling gadgets around the world. One of its biggest markets turns out to be China, which is also a supplier of many components. And working within a quasi-capitalist/quasi-post-communist dictatorship does have its problems.
Yesterday we learned that Apple’s head honcho, Tim Cook, has openly apologized to Chinese consumers.
He did it under pressure . . . from China’s state-run media.
The non-paranoid way of looking at this is that Apple has fallen down on the job of Chinese consumer support. The company’s 17,000 outlets, including eleven Apple-branded stores, just do not service consumer complaints well enough.
This may be true.
But the pile-on by the media looks a little different than, say, the piling-on by America’s media against successful companies here. It has the odor of concerted plan, “commandment from on high.”
And it is well known that China — which tries to plan its economy as much as humanly possible, with the iron fist of totalitarian law — when it gets really serious, gets serious indeed.
So, Tim Cook’s abject apology echoes not so much Apple’s rare apologies in America, but the apologies made by targets of China’s Cultural Revolution, a generation or two ago, at least if the BBC has it right:
State broadcaster CCTV and the state’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, had portrayed Apple as the latest Western company to exploit Chinese citizens.
Last week the paper ran an editorial headlined: “Strike down Apple’s incomparable arrogance.”
Even Apple’s (or Microsoft’s) critics in the West don’t sound that strident.
For the record, I have complaints with all gadgets, all systems, all suppliers. I can truly be nonpartisan on this.
And this is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Apple Abjectly Apologizes for Arrogance”
It is truely unfair that they offer a product that people want.
“Here we have the Western person’s sense of superiority making mischief,” the paper wrote. “If there’s no risk in offending the Chinese consumer, and it also makes for lower overheads, then why not?”
However, some observers in China called it hypocrisy that the paper often does not feature incidents where Chinese companies have been named as part of food safety scares, environmental violations or corruption scandals.”
The only way collectivism can work is through population control, false reporting, and the destruction or sabotage of the genuine western economies. So naturally standards are selectively applied and narrowly defined to apply to foreign companies.
Sustainable energy, agriculture and water supply policies are traceable to China and are being applied strictly to Western countries, with devastating economic consequence. But perhaps China’s economy will collapse first, and the Chinese will succeed in establishing a new era based on law and individual liberty.
Is China’s economy as powerful as the press likes to think?
“There is increasingly loud talk of China surpassing America in raw economic size within the next decade, or, adjusting for purchasing power, as soon as this year. Some of these claims are plainly inaccurate, most are misleading, and all are potentially harmful.
The claims contribute to false impressions about the future of the Asia–Pacific region, even the world as a whole. Perceptions of China’s economic strength and importance underpin its global presence, from its own borders to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. A deeper look, though, shows that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still far smaller and poorer than the U.S. on the most important economic dimensions, so its true global weight is correspondingly limited.” ~heritage org