China

Apple's iPhone 5 may be coming early to China

Two of the three biggest carriers expect to have it in late November or early December

FORTUNE -- In remarks made Friday on the sidelines of the Chinese Communist Party's 18th Party Congress in Beijing the chairmen of two of the country's leading mobile carriers indicated that they may be selling Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 5 even earlier than expected.

China Telecom's (CHA) Wang Xiaochu told the Wall Street Journal that the phone MORE

Video: Foxconn's factory workers get an Apple Store

The company's first retail outlet in Shenzhen, China, employs 250, draws huge crowds

FORTUNE -- Three things struck me about Paco Wong's 18-minute YouTube video (pasted below) from the opening Saturday of Apple's (AAPL) first store in Shenzhen, China:

The number (reportedly 250) of retail staffers the company has employed
The size and enthusiasm of the crowd that showed up for free opening-day T-shirts
The number of iPhones and iPads the people in line already own.

In MORE

Apple's iPad mini fetching $480 in Chinese gray market

Supplies are tight, say Shanghai scalpers, but should ease in a week or so

FORTUNE -- "iPad mini price fry the 3000 yuan cattle worried not sell."

That, according to Google Translate, is the headline in The Phoenix, a Chinese language website that covers the Asian tech market.

The thrust of the story is that although the Apple (AAPL) store in Hong Kong is selling 16GB iPad minis for HK$ 2588 ($334), the MORE

Video: Hoopla at the opening of Beijing's new Apple Store

Apple built a huge, three-story retail outlet -- the city's 3rd -- just in time for the iPhone 5

FORTUNE -- Remember what happened in January when the iPhone 4S arrived in Beijing? Would-be customers and rival gangs of scalpers massed by the thousands outside the company's two stores. Demand totally overwhelmed supply and SWAT teams had to be called in to control the rioting when Apple (AAPL) halted sales before MORE

Can Apple win over China?

If you're the world's largest company - with nearly $600 billion in market value - getting bigger is a tough challenge. But if Apple can learn how to charm the world's largest population, the possibilities are limitless.

By Bill Powell, editor-at-large

FORTUNE -- Tim Cook, Apple's reserved and soft-spoken CEO, has a tendency to wax euphoric about the China market and his company's place in it.

When asked last year by an MORE

How to think about Foxconn

The contract manufacturer has become a symbol for worker abuse, but the Apple partner isn't the only bad actor in China.

By Bill Powell, editor-at-large

FORTUNE -- Hon Hai Precision, a.k.a. Foxconn, has become synonymous with emblematic 21st-century workplace misery. In late September, worker brawls triggered riots at a Foxconn assembly plant in central China. From January to June in 2010, 14 workers at Foxconn's massive operation in Shenzhe -- a MORE

Apple's iPhone 5: The Chinatown factor

Why did one survey find 36% first-time iPhone buyers when a second saw half as many?

FORTUNE -- Here's an odd discrepancy.

In a survey of 100 iPhone 5 buyers conducted outside New York City Apple Stores Friday, Topeka Capital found that 36% (the purple slice of the top pie chart at right) were purchasing their first iPhone -- suggesting that more one in three buyers were switching to an iPhone 5 MORE

Occupy Wall Street activists join the Apple iPhone 5 queue

They arrived Wednesday and settled in for the night in matching red sleeping bags

FORTUNE -- Looks like the launch of the iPhone 5 is about to get political.

Veteran line-sitter Jessica Mellow, who's been camping out in front of the big glass cube of Apple's (AAPL) Fifth Avenue store since last Thursday, reports that at 10 p.m. Wednesday  -- a day and a half before the Friday morning launch of the MORE

Today in Tech: Why the iPhone 5 will be a cash cow for carriers

HP increases number of layoffs; why local entrepreneurs have Facebook beat in China.

Anonymous stole millions of Apple's UDIDs [VENTUREBEAT]

Last week Anonymous claimed it plucked 12 million unique identifiers associated with iPhones from an FBI laptop. Today, however, a Florida publishing company says it was actually its servers that were hacked, according to NBC News.

Facebook's China problem [FORTUNE]

Zuckerberg has said publicly that the company has no immediate plans to enter China. "There MORE

Facebook's China problem

CEO Mark Zuckerberg would like to reach the country's 513 million Internet users. Too bad local entrepreneurs have beaten him to the punch.

FORTUNE -- Last May when Mark Zuckerberg wed his Chinese-American girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a joke began to make the rounds on China's version of Twitter, a microblog -- or weibo -- run by the Internet portal Sina. It went something like this: Chan brings Zuck to meet her MORE