As Beijing extends its efforts to undermine American interests to the realm of Big Tech, Silicon Valley giant Apple is making the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) job easier through a series of decisions that align the iPhone maker with the communist regime over the United States.
Jake Denton, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation, recently highlighted the cozy relationship between Apple and China in an op-ed at The National Pulse. He points out the fact that amid recent anti-lockdown protests in China, Apple took the side of the CCP by disabling AirDrop, the main communication method used by the protesters.
This mirrored the company’s decision three years earlier to remove from its App Store the app that pro-freedom protesters had been using to organize in their demonstrations against the regime in Hong Kong.
At the time, a number of American lawmakers reacted to the move with indignation, penning an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook in which they excoriated the tech company for working with the CCP.
Denton notes:
Apple doesn’t just take orders from China, they depend on China for labor and the manufacturing of their flagship devices, such as the iPhone. In 2016, the company reportedly entered a nearly $275 billion deal with Chinese officials to develop China’s “technological prowess” and economy. As Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) noted in a recent letter to Tim Cook, nearly 95 percent of Apple’s iPhones are now made in Chinese factories. Further, China is Apple’s second largest consumer market, making up more than a fifth of the company’s revenue.
Apple is clearly eager to work with the CCP, even if it means helping the regime suppress free speech. Yet the company seems loath to cooperate with the U.S. government, even on matters of national security. When FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr asked Apple to remove TikTok from the App Store, Apple chose to keep the app available to American consumers — even though the CCP uses the app to spy on the United States.
The cooperation between Apple and the Chinese Communist Party, which openly seeks to undermine U.S. hegemony, is even more alarming in light of the iPhone manufacturer’s stranglehold on the mobile and app markets. Apple and Google hold a duopoly in this sphere, as American mobile users seeking to purchase a smartphone generally must choose a device that runs either the iOS (Apple) or Android (Google) operating system.
Apple certainly uses this unique position to its advantage, charging app makers 30 percent of all in-app transactions in order to have their apps listed in the App Store. If a company gets on the wrong side of Apple, they risk getting themselves yanked from the App Store — and thus seeing their business plummet.
This is what Apple (and Google) did to Twitter alternative Parler when conservatives briefly flocked to it as a free-speech choice. And for a moment, it appeared that Apple was on the verge of doing the same to the new Elon Musk-led Twitter.
Musk stated that Apple is part of a coalition of companies that have pledged to cease doing business with Twitter as a result of the social media platform’s new commitment to free speech. Musk even said Apple had threatened to pull Twitter from the App Store, although he later tweeted that it was simply a misunderstanding.
Nevertheless, Apple wields the power, and it could at any moment drop Twitter in favor of a CCP-approved alternative like WeChat.
At the same time, China is spreading its influence globally through another ingenious move in the tech sphere. The regime is offering LOGINK, a shipment tracking and data management platform, free of charge to ports around the world. LOGINK is already in use in ports in South Korea and Japan, where, notably, the U.S. keeps an important naval presence.
Most American military cargo is transported commercially. As a result, LOGINK could be used by China to acquire information about U.S. military shipping.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.) wrote a letter to Joe Biden on the matter, contending that “The CCP could exploit their control over LOGINK to identify early trends in the movement of U.S. military supplies and equipment through commercial ports while denying other countries the same data on Chinese military assets.”
The letter was co-signed by more than 25 Republicans in Congress, including Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.).
