... no, none of these things apply.

1) 'Pointing out to China it's confusing politics with business' implies a total misunderstanding of their posture, their view of governance, and would probably be antagonistically insulting. It also assumes they are operating in 'good faith', which they are not.

'Politics is Business' to them, they know exactly what they are doing and they have most of the leverage so you risk only ire with that tact.

2) 'Thrown this to a shareholder vote' - so this is definitely not the type of things shareholders vote on, nor do they want to, moreover, the 'transparency' and news cycle this would create would be damaging. This is a 'secret agreement' for a good reason. Shareholders do not care about censorship, they generally just want to see performance.

3) What customers outside of China think is completely irrelevant to China.

4) Threatened to pull all manufacturing out. You definitely do not want to threaten your largest market with anything, but yes, you could hint that it might be best elsewhere. That said, it's a magnanimous threat for something relatively small.

5) There is absolutely no way the CCP is going to 'concede' on any of their red line issues. They are dictating the terms of leverage and oversight to Apple and everyone else. Apple has very little room to manoeuvre here.

The only choice cook had was to play friendly on a personal level, kiss ass, make sure that they felt Apple's interest were aligned with China, and to promise to do a bunch of things they were asking, and then hope they go away.

The issue with China's hyper nationalist economic strategy has to be dealt with at a higher level, i.e. US and European political leaders and industry leaders working together on one page.

Apple had choice. They just didn't use it or much of it.

You write like China has a lock on this ... like it's the perfect lobby. There's only one perfect lobby: and that's the NRA in Doonesbury cartoons.

> I expect a whole hell of a lot more out of American management.

> Goodness gracious serious companies understand there's more going on

That's what you get when your management is exclusively MBAs that never set foot outside of their bubbles and STEM-graduates that are naive in history/geopolitics/economy, etc

This is wrong in every way.

I thought it was literately illegal for publicly traded companies not to put profit first unless they were registered as a non profit (or similar special business classes)

This is mostly a myth: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Thanks. TIL!

Directors must use their powers in “the best interests of the company.” but "business judgment rule gives directors nearly absolute protection from judicial second-guessing about how to best serve the company and its shareholders."

“utterly false” to quote the article.