> Nah, I don't think it is a false dichotomy in this case. It seems unlikely to me in the extreme that China is going to change its policies in response to pressure from some foreign company, even one as large as Apple.

That is still a false dichotomy. They don't necessarily have to change the policy in order to render it ineffective.

Apple is full of smart people. They could think of something if they had to.

Others in the comments have already suggested that they could allow side-loading of apps, which would remove their ability to prevent people from installing VPN apps. So the choice isn't actually "do evil or leave", it's at best "do evil or open the walled garden", which makes the choice they made far less sympathetic.

> More generally, I don't think describing countries & cultures that don't share your particular values as evil is reasonable or useful.

Prohibiting VPNs is part of a wider crackdown on free speech and privacy. If "evil" means doing wrong, that is doing wrong. "The banality of evil" and all of that.

> Apple is full of smart people. They could think of something if they had to.

Funny that is the _exact_ same argument that politicians have made about secure backdoors in communication software for use by "law enforcement only".

> free speech and privacy

Why is that doing wrong? The causality is based in Western humanistic moral belief. You simply should not force your morals on other cultures and countries.

> Funny that is the _exact_ same argument that politicians have made about secure backdoors in communication software for use by "law enforcement only".

The government's argument is that we have the ingenuity to land a man on the moon, therefore it should be no problem to land a man on the sun.

You're arguing that because we can't land a man on the sun, there is no way to land a man on the moon.

The reason the government uses that argument is that it's generally true. Application of resources and ingenuity solves problems. Secure encryption back doors are in the exception box next to perpetual motion machines and faster than light communication.

Subverting censorship is not. People do that all the time.

> Why is that doing wrong? The causality is based in Western humanistic moral belief.

It is doing wrong because free speech is the best known method of preventing civil war. War being right at the top of the list of the most evil things in human experience.

And we're talking about Western beliefs because we're talking about Western people demanding Western values of a Western company.

Setting aside our debate about if free speech is an absolute, cross-cultural moral right or more of a trade-off with other values up to each culture to decide...

Apple itself is a long way from being the free speech crusader you are hoping for; in fact, they are clearly quite pro-censorship: just look at the App store. It's ridiculously censored! The refusals to approve the drone strike app Metadata+ and the Twitter-alternatie Gab strike me as particularly egregious. See also the section "1.1 Objectionable Content" of the app store review guidelines -- it's like stepping back in time to the worst caricature of 1950s America prudery and censorship.

> Apple itself is a long way from being the free speech crusader you are hoping for; in fact, they are clearly quite pro-censorship: just look at the App store. It's ridiculously censored!

This a "two wrongs don't make a right" type situation.

In fact, if the pressure from this could get them to stop doing that, all the better.