It is indeed a legal requirement, and both Google and Microsoft have chosen not to provide services in those areas for this exact reason. Apple is the only major tech company that still operates in China, and has become pretty politically passive in the region. I only bring this up because Apple claims that "privacy is a human right", which I suppose is pretty conditional to what kind of human you are.

> Apple is the only major tech company that still operates in China

This is not even remotely true, even if you define "major tech company" to mean "major US tech company".

Both AWS and Azure have actual cloud regions in China (delivered with a local JV partner just like Apple's cloud services are).

Even Google operates there in various ways - they have four offices there, they manufacture hardware there, and they sell tons of ads to Chinese companies via their local subsidiaries (for display outside of China obviously).

Apple isn‘t simply running iCloud locally as the law may require. They have transferred the operations of their entire iCloud service to a government owned company, including all keys.

What Apple does in China is more than complying with local laws. They appear to be exceptionally proactive in staying in the regime‘s good graces.

Running cloud services in China requires establishing a JV with a local partner. Look at AWS China as another example of this, but there are many.

Can you provide a reference for Apple's JV partners being government owned? Any company in China of course has to do as the Party tells them to, so I guess the difference is largely academic, but I haven't seen it mentioned before that Apple's China partners are government-owned.

This is what was reported at the time:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...

There are conflicting reports and vague language around how exactly the keys are handled.

Thanks for the link, very interesting.