[NTD News December 08, 2021, Beijing time]Recently, US media disclosed that Apple CEO Cook personally lobbied senior CCP officials and signed a secret investment agreement worth up to 275 billion U.S. dollars with the CCP authorities in 2016. Eliminate threats that could put Apple’s devices and services in China into trouble.
The Internet media “The Information”, headquartered in San Francisco, California, reported on December 7 that the CCP suddenly increased its supervision of Apple’s business that year. Amid the suppression by the CCP authorities and the subsequent bad publicity, Apple’s smartphone sales have plummeted in China.
According to Apple’s internal documents, Apple CEO Cook visited China several times in 2016 in order to cancel a series of regulatory actions by the Chinese Communist government against the company and reached a secret agreement with the Chinese Communist Party to deal with possible obstacles to Apple Pay, iCloud and App. Threats to Apple devices and services such as the Store.
Cook signed a memorandum of understanding during his first visit in May. During his second visit three months later, he met with Zhang Gaoli, Vice Premier of the Communist Party of China. In October, Cook visited China for the third time. He was personally invited by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. According to a person familiar with the matter, this invitation strengthened Apple’s ability to negotiate with the Chinese Communist Party’s regulatory agencies.
The report said that in the past six years, the iPhone has become the best-selling smartphone in China, and Apple’s mainland market has become the second largest market after the United States, largely because of the company’s CEO Cook for many years. The result of the secret signing of an agreement with China.
According to the report, the Chinese Communist Party believed at the time that Apple was not contributing enough to China’s local economy. Cook therefore lobbied the CCP and promised CCP officials that Apple will try its best to help develop China’s economic and technological strength through investment, business transactions, and worker training.
In addition, Apple also announced in May 2016 that it would invest $1 billion in the start-up Didi Chuxing to help the latter gain an advantage in the competition with Uber China.
Apple also promised to use more components from Chinese suppliers in its equipment, sign agreements with Chinese software companies, conduct technical cooperation with Chinese universities, and directly invest in Chinese technology companies.
Internal documents show that Chinese officials are trying to send a message that Apple needs to better comply with Chinese laws and stop operating its services without complying with local regulations.
Apple must abide by Chinese laws, which has caused its App Store to receive more scrutiny in areas such as news, virtual private networks and LGBTQ-related applications, and refuses Chinese users to provide new privacy features.
According to an email sent by Apple to Chinese users, Apple stated in late October that it would comply with the new CCP’s data security law, which requires foreign companies to store more data about Chinese users in China so that local law enforcement officials can Access this data.
Apple’s actions in China have been criticized by the outside world. Some netizens have commented that Apple “turned over all user data to the data cloud center in Guizhou, which is a betrayal to be precise.”
(Reported by reporter Liu Minghuan/Editor in charge: Zhu Xinrui)
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