Non-fiction Book Club Meetup Group

Named by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Prospect magazine as a best book of the year, this “scrupulously reported” (The New Yorker) and “astonishing” (The Daily Telegraph, London) book rivets with its portrayal of how Apple allowed itself to become dependent on China for a huge percentage of its manufacturing, making it vulnerable and unwittingly laying the groundwork for the Asian superpower to rival the US in technological expertise.

After struggling to build products on three continents, Apple turned to China’s seemingly endless supply of cheap labor. It soon deployed thousands of engineers, trained millions of workers, and invested hundreds of billions of dollars to create the most advanced global supply chain. These efforts fueled the iPhone’s dominance—but also laid the foundation for a powerful, state-supported Chinese electronics industry. What began as a business decision evolved into a cautionary tale of global trade, tech rivalry, and national security.

Without intending to, Apple helped Beijing acquire technological influence that could now be weaponized—a central concern in the ongoing US-China tech war. Drawing on over two hundred interviews, Patrick McGee exposes never-before-reported details from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen: internal emails, secretive executive meetings, and overlooked voices inside the company’s China operations.

You’ll meet the “Gang of Eight” executives tasked with appeasing Beijing, a Mormon missionary who launched Apple retail in China, and a veteran whose dreams of improving factory conditions were crushed by both Apple’s demands and Xi Jinping’s authoritarian crackdown. From Foxconn and Tim Cook to the Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan Semiconductor, this is a revelatory look at how Apple, in seeking efficiency, became entangled in the very politics it once claimed to challenge.

For readers of Chip War, American Factory, and The Big Short, Apple in China is a searing examination of corporate power, Chinese nationalism, deglobalization, and the fragile relationship between Silicon Valley and the world’s rising superpower.

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Facilitator: Lyn
Book Club Questions:
Supply Chain and the Design of Dependency

• Q1. McGee argues that Apple captured huge profits by mastering China while China “captured” Apple by becoming indispensable to its manufacturing. Do you agree with this? Who holds the the ultimate leverage today?
• Q2. How did learning about Apple’s practice of putting its own capital equipment inside Chinese factories change your perspective on outsourcing?
• Q3. The Apple Squeeze Apple squeezed Chinese suppliers to operate on thin profit margins. How did China benefit from this?

Ethics and Corporate Identity

• Q4. How did Apple reconcile its reputation as a renegade with its compliance with an authoritarian regime?
• Q5. At what point does compliance become ethical failure?

Leadership and Strategy

• Q6. Is Tim Cook an operational genius or a leader that lead Apple into a Chinese trap?
• Q7. What did you think of the Gang of Eight who engaged in corporate diplomacy with the Chinese government?

Geopolitics and the Future

• Q8. Taiwan is now negotiating re-integrating into China as they no longer believe the US will defend them. How will this affect Apple? What happens when XI controls TSCM? Will Apple’s $55 billion investment in China protect it?

═════ $$ Donations:

Our events are free but donations are much appreciated. Your money will support our subscriptions to Meetup.com and Zoom. Please consider an e-transfer to toronto.nonfiction@gmail.com, using either https://www.paypal.com or Interac. PWYC. Thanks!

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The Christian Science Monitor's #1 Best Book of the Year. A witty, informative, and popular travelogue about the Scandinavian countries and how they may not be as happy or as perfect as we assume, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People offers up the ideal mixture of intriguing and revealing facts” (Laura Miller, Salon).

Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than ten years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely book he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another.

Why are the Danes so happy, despite having the highest taxes? Do the Finns really have the best education system? Are the Icelanders as feral as they sometimes appear? How are the Norwegians spending their fantastic oil wealth? And why do all of them hate the Swedes? In The Almost Nearly Perfect People Michael Booth explains who the Scandinavians are, how they differ and why, and what their quirks and foibles are, and he explores why these societies have become so successful and models for the world. Along the way a more nuanced, often darker picture emerges of a region plagued by taboos, characterized by suffocating parochialism, and populated by extremists of various shades. They may very well be almost nearly perfect, but it isn’t easy being Scandinavian.

═════ Discussion questions:

TBD
Facilitator: Andrii

═════ $$ Refundable deposit:

We'd like to make sure everyone on the RSVP actually intends to join us and enjoy the event.

One of Barack Obama's recommended books on AI. Financial Times Best Books of 2023. From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" (Financial Times).

Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientist — a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table— who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.”

Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China’s middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.

Fei-Fei’s adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities—and the extraordinary dangers—of the technology she loves.

The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century’s defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is—and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart.

═════ Discussion questions:

TBD
Facilitator: Andrii

═════ $$ Refundable deposit:

We'd like to make sure everyone on the RSVP actually intends to join us and enjoy the event.