I thought the point was they couldn't say no? Hence the warrant canaries and things like that. And the NSA hooking directly into Google's internal fibre etc etc.
To be clear I think your points are interesting from the perspective of "the chinese government is morally worse and I'm worried about those implications", I'm just trying to work out as someone who doesn't live there (but is clearly OK participating in their economy, I buy endless chinese goods) how that affects me concretely.
My point is, I think it is harder to de-tangle a Chinese corporation's objectives from China (the governments) objectives than say a corporation in the US or EU. There are stronger laws and separation of controls (on the books and in practice) in those regions.
Do I trust the US government? Not terribly. Do I trust the US government more than China as a US Citizen? Yes. Should you? I don't know.
Defending against nation state targeting as an individual may be an impossible task unless you follow in Richard Stallman's footsteps, in which case, the conversation about LoL installing a kernel driver in Windows is very much outside your concerns :)
If the Chinese government came to Apple, could they say no any easier than Tencent?
Edit: The implication is that, if the government of China, was exceptionally interested placing a backdoor in the software of a Tencent system, they may not be able to reasonably object. Where if the FBI came to Apple, (and we know they have) they can say no. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...