Apple is quite obedient in China.
That's because it doesn't want its executives in China to be disappeared, or denied an exit visa, or simply arrested arbitrarily.
1) China has demonstrated plenty of times that it is not to be messed with, while EU, if anything (especially with GDPR) has demonstrated that you can keep breaking the rules and even a history of obvious bad faith is not a problem.
2) China has a successful domestic smartphone/tech industry that can (and does) compete with Apple. The EU doesn’t. It’s a much easier decision for China to kick out Apple than for the EU to do so.
3) I believe Apple also depends on China for manufacturing, so pissing them off could go beyond a national ban on sales and even affect production of international devices.
* Amazon was fined $908 million in 2022.
* Google was fined $113 million in the same year.
* Instagram, owned by Meta was fined $506 million.
Each of these fines would be drastically increased with further non-compliance
> Each of these fines would be drastically increased with further non-compliance
Meta has a history of non-compliance, bad faith and obvious incentive to breach EU regulations given they are in direct opposition to their business model. It has been in breach of the GDPR since it went into effect in 2018 (after a 2-year grace period designed to give businesses time to get into compliance) and is in breach of it to this day. Is it even possible to be more non-compliant than that?
At this point Meta has made so much profit from breaching the GDPR that even actually being hit with the max fine would still not offset what they earned breaching the regulation over the last 6 years since the max fine only considers revenue over the last year.
The EU has repeatedly demonstrated it is incapable or unwilling to stand up to these companies and the companies know it, that's why Meta is still around doing business as usual, and Apple is messing around with malicious compliance and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future. That's why Microsoft is now back at anticompetitive shenanigans despite getting burnt previously - they (correctly) determined that whatever EU enforcement capability burned them before no longer exists.
Wasn't really my point though.
From yet another perspective, all censorship is bad whether it's implicit or explicit. If Apple spends money fighting and lobbying against market protections while caving into surveillance demands abroad, it says a lot about the "spirit" in which they interpret legislation.
> Reconsider travel to Mainland China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.
No justice system that's actually fair can have a 99.8% conviction rate at trial. It's a process designed to achieve convictions and punishment, not actually discover the truth.
Well, to be fair, there are also other more practical factors at play !
1. The sheer size of the market. Population of China is bigger than that of the US and the EU combined.
2. Although Apple are working on establishing manufacturing elsewhere, a large portion of their manufacturing still happens in China at the moment.
I suspect, if you were in Apple's shoes, loosing (1), (2) or both is a far worse position to be in than one or two executives "disappearing".
Executives "disappearing" is of course bad, but they are ultimately replaceable. Loosing the Chinese market or having constraints put on your manufacturing at short notice is a significantly bigger problem.
Its the same reason Microsoft famously had no choice but to show the Chinese the Windows source code.
I'm not defending China. I'm just saying, if you want to have business operations in a country (China or otherwise), you play by their rules. Being a large multi-national will only ultimately give you so much leeway with the authorities.