Apple’s business model made Chinese oppression inevitable

A month ago, a wave of rare political protests swept China, centered on Beijing, where Premier Xi Jinping was consolidating his already-substantial power by claiming an unprecedented third term:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/22/china/china-party-congress-overseas-students-protest-intl-hnk
Protest organizers in China struggle with the serious legal and extrajudicial penalties for anti-government activities, backed by a sophisticated digital surveillance grid that monitors and blocks online communications that might challenge government authority.
Though this digital surveillance network is now primarily supplied and serviced by Chinese tech companies, it can’t be separated from western tech companies. The first version of the Chinese digital surveillance grid was built by Cisco:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-dodge-responsibility-facilitating-human-rights-abuses-export
Tech companies like Yahoo went into China knowing that they’d have to censor the internet, and ultimately turned over their users’ data to Chinese authorities, who subsequently arrested and tortured some of those users:
https://www.technewsworld.com/story/yahoo-charged-with-complicity-in-chinese-torture-case-57011.html
Google pulled out of China in 2010, after the Chinese government hacked and arrested Gmail users. But eight years later, Google was secretly working on Project Dragonfly, a censoring, surveilling search product designed for the Chinese market:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138307/how-google-took-on-china-and-lost/