I was going to comment that I think the question referred to what course of action /Apple/ should take, but maybe fundamentally changing superstates is not off the table when you have multinational megacorp resources.

What are you suggesting? Revolution?

And how could Apple accomplish that?

By threatening to pull manufacturing.

China adds so little value there I don’t think it would cause a blip. Then Apple would have decide somewhere else to do that with the right supply chain in place.

I think(I hope) as more people in China come online they will realize that they are missing out.

Sadly the opposite might occur. Fake news is very useful. For corporations, it acts like PR/marketing channel. For nation-states it's a great propaganda channel.

What if the Communist Party of China was actually visionaries what the Internet could do for oppressive nation-states, if properly harnessed for the good of the party?

This was the hope with the internet here in the US. Hundreds of millions of users later, the average person seems even less informed on the world around them. Access is meaningless if good information is less appealing or is made to seem less credible than propaganda.