You pretty much have no idea what's happening in China. These companies are not happy at all to cooperate believe me. Jack Ma has expressed this many times, as much as he could without getting in bad terms with his own government. These companies are playing around in order not to comply with the government (which is exactly what US companies are doing as well). Pressure from the public or from other countries should get these companies some leverage when negotiating with the gov.
Exactly. iCloud Master Key? Done, no VPN in App Store? Done. List of Banned Keyboards in App Store? Done. iMessages, I assume is still encrypted, but China don't give a damn about it as long as they can get it via iCloud.
Apple was publicly able to say no, but what happened in private?
In fact TLAs would want it to appear that they'd been rebuffed -- there's not much point in them having access to devices that no one will use because they know about that access.
Apple has a vested interest in being honest and transparent about this specifically because nobody would trust them if it was discovered that they'd been secretly cooperating with everything in private while denying it in public. A revelation like that would literally ruin them as a company, and that's generally not the end goal for most companies.
