But how would not selling iPhones in China, on principle, help anyone?

The perfect world where Apple tells China what to do doesn't exist. Ok. We know that.

Now what? Bail? Why? Stick around and play by the rules and play the game and maybe someday make 1% positive difference? Seems like the lesser of two evils to me.

I recognize that rape, robbery, assault and murder are sadly inevitable parts of human life, but I refuse to participate in, aid, or abett it. The inevitability of wrong-doing is not license to be a doer.

So it’s not the lesser of two evils, it’s just participation in evil for profit.

Do you pay taxes to a country that has a violent military presence in the Middle East (or any other conflict area)? Or to a local police department that has any history of unnecessary force to police non-violent crimes?

Most of us do. We don't have much of a choice. We could choose to earn so little that we don't have to pay much or anything in taxes or move elsewhere but, well, we want to live better that or live in a specific area.

This isn’t even good whataboutism, it’s downright lazy. Apple is a giant corporation that avoids taxes, not a citizen with few or no choices. This is a business maximizing profit, by choice, in another market.

Just because someone is going to get screwed either way, doesn't mean it's OK to be the one screwing them. Apple claims that they care about the privacy of their users, but this demonstrates that they don't care at all.

No it doesn't. It demonstrates that Apple respects the laws of the country it operates in. Apple has no moral responsibility to force its privacy views on other countries, and it has no power to do so anyway.

Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.

Yes, it does. Apple has the option to not do business there. They can simply walk away. And by walking away, they are allowing other people to hold onto their own beliefs, while not encouraging them.

> Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.

I don't really disagree with this, but I'm not sure what it has to do with what I posted. Not doing business with a group of people because you disagree with how they want that business done is completely unrelated to "forcing other people to have our standard".

We can’t force anything, but profiting from it is another story which contains a moral dimension regardless of your ideological stance. There is no legal responsibility, but morals are sticky. For what it’s worth though, I appreciate your demonstration of the rationalization I mentioned in my first comment.