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What do Americans consistently misunderstand about China — its people, its politics, and how it quietly became the world’s manufacturing powerhouse?
This week, I sit down with Joshua Woodward, a South Side Chicago native turned MIT mechanical engineer who spent four years inside Apple’s camera supply chain in Shenzhen before founding a manufacturing consultancy based in China.
Josh didn’t just visit China — he lived through three and a half years of COVID lockdown, worked daily on factory floors, spoke fluent Mandarin to stunned locals, and built relationships inside the manufacturing ecosystem that produces the world’s most complex consumer electronics.
In this conversation, he exposes:
• Why America has engineering talent — but China has the ecosystem
• What Americans get wrong about work culture, surveillance, and freedom
• How Apple accidentally accelerated China’s tech dominance
• Why tariffs don’t work and end up hurting Americans
• What it’s like to be Black in China, and how language breaks barriers
• Why China and the U.S. are more alike than we think
Josh’s story moves from surviving Chicago, to obsessing over MIT at age 12, to becoming an Apple insider shaping devices billions of people use — and shows how much of what we assume about China collapses under firsthand experience.
If you think you understand China — this episode will challenge you.
About the GuestJoshua Charles Woodward
• MIT Mechanical Engineering
• Former Apple Engineering Project Manager in Shenzhen
• Founder, The Sparrows — a China-based manufacturing consultancy
