I did an 8months stint doing some data modelling at a Chinese start-up in Beijing.
Visa was difficult but company culture there really respects people who are experienced and innovative. Most the workers there aren't really passionate about what they do (From my understanding, most Chinese startups don't give equity to their employees)
English is a huge advantage as we have access to an awesome global community of people.
Pay is surprisingly good, but living cost in Beijing is deceivingly high as well.
I feel like hes allowed to do what he wants with his influence/money/connections. If I fell victim to defamation by a news outlet and I had the ability to put a stop to it, I would.
If you have no technical background then you should start by learning a programming language such as python. If you do hav a technical background learning optimisation and machine learning has two paths. 1) theory 2) practical. Most of the time in these two fields to start off as a beginner in depth theory knowledge is not required so you can play around with some open source libraries and get started that way.
In terms of iOS and entrepreneurial ventures my opinion is that you shouldn't focus on say "iOS" as you have framed it. Startups is about finding a problem and building a product that people will use. iOS is a tool that will help you to do so. Likewise the product could be a website (so you'd use a different tool to build, such as ruby on rails) so it ultimately comes down to what you want to do.
If you don't have a technical background, even to do a business role in the tech world, it won't hurt to learn one programming language as from there you will have your foot in the door.
Perhaps you can look at optimization or machine learning. Optimization of processes and algorithms can be applied to almost anything out there and Obviously machine learning is new and hot and will continue to be a hot topic in the near future.