China's smartphone shipments jump 199 PER CENT! China’s bid to for world domination in all things mobile took another step in the last quarter as smartphone shipments leapt 199 per cent from the same period last year and now account for more than a quarter of the global total, according to Canalys. The analyst’s final Q2 2012 country-level shipment estimates reveal that 42 …
Yes, it's fanciful paranoia. How, exactly, would backdoors be inserted in Apple products just by virtue of them being assembled in China? It is software that allows for backdoors, and the software is written and distributed by Apple in the US.
I suppose if you have a particularly ill-fitting tinfoil hat you might believe they somehow added another chip into iPhones (without Apple ever noticing and saying "hey, what's that thing, we didn't have that in our original design") that somehow magically overrides everything else to provide a back door.
It's much more likely that the cheap Chinese phones manufactured in China specifically for the Chinese market include backdoors. But it would be mostly pointless so long as non-backdoored stuff made by non Chinese companies like Apple and Samsung was available to Chinese buyers.
When the disappointing Apple results were announced last month, one of the reason reviewed in many articles (including, I think, here on El Reg) was that sales in China were down because there was less demand there (and the channels had been stuffed - presumably inflating previous quarter results). Seems like there's less demand in China or 199% growth. A scenario in which both might be true is if Chinese punters are choosing to not buy Apple.
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