Opinion | More Apple bashing from Beijing

The latest assault on Apple by Chinese media is motivated by several factors, including frustration that the company isn't investing more in China.

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Page 9 of the People's Daily on March 28, 2013, which is dedicated to criticism against Apple. Photo: SCMP Pictures

Published: 10:25am, 28 Mar 2013Updated: 12:25pm, 28 Mar 2013

Beijing's recent campaign to bash iPhone maker Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) is starting to border on the bizarre, with the official Communist Party newspaper the People's Daily launching the latest assault on the world's biggest tech company.

I've lived in China for quite a while now, and have seen occasional attacks on major foreign names in the official Chinese media, including my own former employer Reuters. But most of those attacks are related to specific incidents, and usually lasted a week or 2 at the most before the issue was quietly retired.

By comparison, this recent series of attacks on Apple seems a bit more sustained, and doesn't really appear to have a particular incident at its core. If anything, Apple seemed finally to be moving in the right direction in China when media reported early this year that the company was in talks to open its first Chinese research and development centre.

I'll return to the earlier R&D reports shortly, but first let's take a look at the latest news that has the People's Daily publishing a new editorial highly critical of the US tech giant. I'll admit I haven't read the editorial myself, but media reports say it lambasts Apple with a headline that reads: "Let's Strike Away Apple's Unparalleled Arrogance." The editorial goes on to criticise Apple for a number of faults, including greed and dishonesty. But its biggest grievance is Apple's "swaggering arrogance."

The editorial appears to be tied to another report critical of Apple that ran on March 15 on CCTV, China's biggest broadcaster and also a mouthpiece of the Communist Party. That report ran on China's national consumer day, and attacked Apple for engaging in practices that cheated some customers out of extensions to their warranties after problems occurred with their iPhones.

To be fair, Apple wasn't alone in being targeted for attack by CCTV, which ran a long series of reports criticising a wide range of other domestic and foreign companies for similar deceptive practices.

But Apple was clearly the lead story of the series of reports that day. I previously commented that CCTV's grievances against Apple were relatively minor and only affected a small number of iPhone buyers, and that the company was most likely targeted by overeager editors intent on finding any problem at all at Apple. Many Chinese netizens also came to Apple's defence; but perhaps most embarrassing, a number of netizens uncovered evidence that CCTV had actually paid celebrities to criticise Apple on their microblogs after the TV report was broadcast, in its own deceptive move to show the impact of its reporting.