This study analyzes Mainland China’s official and unofficial reception of the iPhone, a highly popular smartphone made by Apple. Apple, with its synergistic business measures, seeks to shape all aspects of iPhone users’ mobile experiences, whether related to hardware, software, content, or service. As Apple attempts to expand on its U.S. success, the iPhone case in China displays many contradictory stories of Apple’s globalization endeavors. This article analyzes the structural obstacles facing Apple that come from the Chinese bureaucratic capitalist party-state and local wireless carriers and reveals both the creativity of Chinese iPhone users and the limits of their resistant tactics. To make sense of the intricacies of this global-local encounter, we need to combine political economic and critical cultural analyses and interpret resistance in light of the power imbalance intensified by media convergence and corporate synergy on the structural level.
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