I’m the one that “broke” the story the author mentioned as being reported in 2015. At the time, the team at the New York Times reached out to a source at Apple that confirmed that this behavior was intentional: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/technology/apple-is-said-...

iOS disables Apple news based on the mobile country code / network code and not on the name in my experience.

If your iOS device doesn’t have cellular capability or if it is in airplane mode, it uses Ip addresses. This means you can enable airplane mode and connect to a vpn over Wi-Fi and circumvent the censorship.

The mechanism that does this appears to be the same mechanism that disables “global” Apple maps and switches to Apple maps provided by Chinese map maker Autonavi.

I wrote this post at the time the explains the censorship behavior which hasn’t changed.

https://www.larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china...