Apple isn't doing as well as it could in China. Why? The chairman of China's tech giant Lenovo thinks it's largely down to Steve Jobs himself, as the killer quote in the Financial Times article which is the source of this discussion reveals: "We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble."

The worker's environment in Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn has been a sticky issue for Apple's PR department, but it's also highlighted one big fact: If Western firms stick with Chinese sources, gadgets will get more expensive. This is the thrust of a piece at the New York Times, which starts by looking at the reports about the new tear-down revelations concerning Apple's newest iPhone version: The smallest part of the cost of putting the thing together seems to be the manufacturing/assembly element, in China.

Quick quiz: Who are the three largest Internet companies in the world by market capitalization? If you guessed Google and Amazon you got two right, but I’m betting few of our American readers guessed the third. I certainly wouldn’t have a year ago. It’s not eBay or Yahoo; it’s Tencent. If you are in the Web space and haven’t heard of them, read this post, because Tencent’s cutesy penguin mascot is only going to cast a larger shadow in the global Web world in coming years.

The media fuss about recent suicides at China's Foxconn company, an electronics manufacturer that supports, among others, Apple, has prompted a debate about the future. In particular, will rising wages drive tech firms elsewhere for cheap labor?

Yesterday, I had lunch with one of the top people in the Chinese Internet scene who said, “We have a saying here, ‘Internet multinationals all fail in China, Google was just the last one to go.’”