Smartphones are like trousers. They’re unnatural, a human artifice that our species survived many millennia without, but which has now proliferated to the point of being essential to everyday life across most of the globe. China’s meteoric economic rise this century sees the Asian country occupying the dual role of the world’s biggest producer and biggest consumer of smartphones. This makes it the most essential nation to humanity’s most essential modern tool, and as such, it insulates China from new American president-elect Donald Trump’s threats of punishing trade tariffs.
One of the tentpole features of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy, from the outset, has been the desire to rectify perceived unfairness in trade with China. Mr. Trump has repeatedly accused China of being a currency manipulator — a claim dismissed as invalid by economists observing the Asia region — and has indicated that he’d adopt an “America first” strategy in his dealings with US trade partners. In response, China has come out and not too subtly hinted that it would undermine iPhone sales if it were ever subjected to Trump’s proposed brand of American protectionism.
To quote an editorial posted to the website of China’s state mouthpiece Global Times, “A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus. US auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and US soybean and maize imports will be halted.”
Apple can’t build an iPhone without China, but China can build many awesome phones without Apple
There’s an asymmetry here that Mr. Trump seems unaware of. Apple can’t build an iPhone without China, but China can build hundreds of millions of devices approaching the iPhone’s quality without Apple’s help. Earlier this year, I wrote about just how narrow the delta between Apple’s smartphone and its once-copycats from China has become. The president-elect has promised to bring manufacturing back to the States, but the only Apple product currently being made in the USA is the aged Mac Pro, which costs thousands of dollars, and Motorola’s failed experiment with the 2013 Moto X shows that smartphone assembly in the US is too costly to be viable.