Are Apple’s Hands Tied When it Comes to China’s Choices?
18 billion dollars of Apple's revenue from China are at stake each time it has to choose between its ideals and the chance to enjoy the big bucks. When the Taiwanese flag emoji, HKmap, and Quartz disappeared from China’s keyboards and app stores, people started asking questions. Can a company stay in business if it does not adhere to the wishes of powerful foreign governments, and instead chooses to stick to its mission statement?
Protestors in Hong Kong have dominated the headlines for quite some time now, their demand for democracy having aggravated China. Therefore, any interference in this turmoil can prove to be harmful: something that the developers of the application HKmap experienced in early October.
HKmap was an application designed to help residents of Hong Kong avoid areas crowded with police and protestors, making commuting more convenient. After being originally rejected by Apple on the 26th of September and then the 2nd of October, it was finally approved to be released onto the App Store due to the outburst on Twitter by the developers and protestors, following the second rejection. The developers called Apple’s rejection a “political decision to suppress freedom” and voiced their opinions through Twitter. Their rage was fueled by the support from Android users of the app who were able to demonstrate that HKmap improved public safety.
The initial rejection of the app did not concern China’s government, but the latter did. The initial rejection was due to aspects regarding payment options and so after fixing them, the developers expected to see no more hurdles. However, Apple defended its second rejection by stating that HKmap helped users evade the law. This was seen by the developers, and the Android users of HKmap, as unfair to the citizens of Hong Kong. So, when Apple faced backlash for its rejection, it chose to allow the release of the app.
But this sparked criticism from China’s communist newspaper. The article in People’s Daily came out in October after the app was released on the App store. It shed light on the government’s skepticism towards the goal of such applications, calling it a "navigation service for the rioters." Consequently, HKmap was then taken off the Appstore.
In other instances, Apple has also removed the Taiwanese flag emoji from Chinese users’ keyboards and banned Quartz, a media outlet that provided its users access to information about pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. These choices at large, reflect Apple’s inability to deliver its services to users without significant influence by the Chinese government.
However, these are all considerable decisions as a company may not want to ask for trouble from the world’s second-largest economy. China is a huge market that generates about the same amount of revenue as the rest of the Asia Pacific and Japan put together, and upsetting China can cause a backlash on Apple’s products. This is not surprising because any government, or even citizen, would not want to buy products from a company that does not support their personal beliefs. Take the United States, for example, where customers who did not support Donald Trump trashed and burnt shoes from New Balance Athletics Inc. to show their outrage that was caused by the company offering Donald Trump his first sneaker endorsement.
Apple experienced this after the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei and the daughter of its founder. The arrest escalated the two countries’ relationship to even less an amicable one. China has felt that the United States has always mistreated their tech companies, especially after Huawei secured a larger market share for smartphones than Apple in May of last year. That is why several Chinese companies have started to promote Huawei products instead of that of Apple’s. And when China makes up 20%of a company’s revenues, political tension like such can truly be damaging. This has been seen in Apple’s 27% decline in revenues from China this year and Tim Cook pointing fingers to the tensions between the United States and China.
However, this isn’t just any company. Apple was the first public company to be valued at $1 trillion and has always shown this characteristic of a trendsetter when it came up with the Macintosh in 1984 and the iPhone in 2007. It has been called a "symbol of innovation and elegance in design," reflecting the original mission statement by Steve Jobs.
Apple’s mission statement, as delivered by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, focuses on the empowerment of man. Although open to interpretation, as shown by the several years of innovation since then, empowerment- to the United States and Apple- is about the expansion of freedoms. This can be the accessibility to computers and information or the opportunity to communicate with people on the other side of the world. Therefore, expecting Apple to provide all its users the same accessibility to information and technology seems reasonable.
However, the relationships between business and politics are too tangled to understand separately; with many factors that have resulted in a contention between Apple’s ideals and China’s interests arising from the difference of cultures and interests. Apple’s beliefs are an extension of the most fundamental aspects of American society, fueled by individualism and the pursuit of success through one’s ideas and hard work. Whereas, the Chinese government’s values of group harmony and stability build open the idea of respect for its community members.
This is why Apple’s ideals are at stake when it prevents an app from helping people avoid trouble in Hong Kong, hinders the expression of ideas related to Taiwan by removing its flag from the emoji keyboard, and restricts access to information with the banning of Quartz. All this is damaging to Apple’s ideals, but prevents the hardships that could be faced by a company that does not cooperate with China.
We can see China’s response to companies that do not comply with them through their list of 'unreliable entities’, which consist of foreign companies that China feels “severely damages the legitimate interest of Chinese firms”. Although no one outside of China knows which companies are on that list, there are several speculations. One started when China investigated FedEx Corp. earlier this year, which many link to their actions against Huawei. Ford Motor Co. on the other hand, was fined for what China claims to be a violation of antitrust laws. Therefore, China can truly damage a company’s growth.
It’s clear that decisions about providing information on pro-democracy ideas or services that can contribute to protests are complex. Revenues result from keeping large markets like China happy, but the spirit of innovation and creating connections can be lost when profits are a business’ only focus. Politics makes these decisions harder because costs and prices are not the only factors to consider. Politics, with its network of power relations, deeply influence the decisions made by businesses. Even the strongest companies such as Apple demonstrate that the powerful wishes of government cannot be ignored if they are to survive.