Last week, Wired reported that Apple removed two of China’s most popular gay dating apps, Blued and Finka, from the App Store at the behest of the Chinese government. The move appears to be part of a larger crackdown on China’s LGBT community, which has faced growing oppression by an authoritarian regime that has come to see gay people as unwelcome harbingers of Western cultural influence: Pride parades have been canceled, gay-rights groups shut down, and LGBT-centric social media accounts censored, as have TV shows featuring gay themes. So, how does an American company with an openly gay CEO and that frequently touts its own ostensibly pro-LGBT bona fides find itself helping to facilitate Beijing’s ongoing anti-gay crackdown?
To find out, I spoke to Patrick McGee, author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. You might remember him from his Honestly interview earlier this year. In his book, McGee argues that Apple’s investments in China were akin to something like the Marshall Plan. It built China’s advanced electronics industry, but in the process, Apple also built itself a trap: The “world’s greatest company” now finds itself beholden to an authoritarian regime that it can’t live without.
