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Tim Cook quoted a Chinese proverb about planting forests. Premier Li Qiang called China a harbour of stability. Together on a Beijing stage today, the Apple chief and China’s second-most powerful official put on a show of mutual dependence.
The setting was the China Development Forum, held each March at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing. More than 70 chief executives came, including the heads of UBS and HSBC. China runs the forum every year after its parliament wraps up. It is how Beijing gets its message in front of global business leaders all at once.
Li told the room China was a “cornerstone of certainty”. It was a dig at what Beijing sees as an unstable America, now fighting a war with Iran. He did not name the US or Trump directly, but nobody in the room missed the point.
George Chen, a partner at the Asia Group consultancy who was there, said it was the most confident he had seen Li speak in years.
“China will unswervingly promote high-level opening up to the outside,” Li told the audience, “jointly expanding the global economic and trade pie.”
Li also held up Apple by name as a model of supply chain diversification, using it to argue against what he called the weaponization of trade. “If we politicize industrial issues and deliberately weaponize the supply chain, we will only increase costs for various companies and weaken development momentum,” he said.
Cook, speaking after Li, kept the same warm tone. He told the audience that innovation, green development and education were “deeply connected” and said Apple was fully committed to its Chinese partners.
He praised the country’s developer community and pointed to gains in automation across Apple’s manufacturing network there.
Then came the proverb. “A single tree does not make a forest,” Cook said. “Together, I believe we can plant that forest.”
$25 billion reasons Apple needs China
The warmth is not hard to explain. Apple pulled in $25.5 billion from China in the holiday quarter ending December, a 38% jump from the year before, driven by the latest iPhone and customers moving away from rival brands.
Earlier this month, the company cut its App Store commission for Chinese developers from 30% to 25%, bowing to pressure from local regulators. It was not enough for everyone; the Communist Party’s People’s Daily followed up by calling on Apple to do more, accusing the company of “monopolistic” practices.
Beijing is also using the forum to sell its five-year economic plan to 2030 as a foreign investment opportunity. People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng used a speech today to push back on criticism of Chinese exports.
He said the country’s edge comes from economic reforms, a large domestic market and strong supply chains, not government handouts.
Without naming the US, he blamed persistent trade deficits in some countries on a global financial system built around a single dominant currency. China’s own trade surplus hit a record $1.2 trillion last year, a number that has put Beijing on the defensive in both Europe and Washington.
President Xi Jinping skipped the executive meetings this year, unlike the previous two forums.
A sit-down between Xi and Trump that had been penciled in for around April 1 was called off, though Trump is still expected to make the trip to China later in the year.
On Saturday evening, vice-premier He Lifeng, the official running trade talks with Washington, hosted a dinner for mostly European executives to walk them through the five-year plan. One person at the dinner said the executives were broadly positive but that Chinese overcapacity and the risks it poses to European industry did come up.
Washington goes hard on blocking Nvidia chips from China
While Cook and Li were trading pleasantries in Beijing, federal prosecutors in the US were unsealing charges against Wally Liaw, 71, co-founder of server company Super Micro Computer. It shows China’s insatiable demand for American technology that Washington has decided it cannot have.
Liaw is accused of helping route $2.5 billion in Nvidia AI servers to Chinese buyers in violation of export control laws. The servers carried chips from Nvidia’s Blackwell line, which Washington bars from sale to China because of their role in training advanced AI systems.
Prosecutors say Liaw and associates ran an elaborate operation. Within weeks, $510 million in servers were shipped to China.
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