I don't think you know what China's legal requirements in censorship are. I think you're trying to infer what they are from the fact that the censorship of other content sources works somewhat differently. But these look like differences in implementation details.

> ...censoring news voluntarily...

That just doesn't make sense. If Apple wanted to censor their News app, there's no reason they would restrict themselves to China. They could "block" it everywhere, if that's what they wanted to do -- by simply not having a News app at all.