Apple has shown the willingness to compromise to access the Chinese market, so there's absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't or haven't bow to their other demands, including the weakening of their device security.
> If I were Chinese I'd be feeling pretty damn patronized if someone told me they were taking my iPhone away and I should be happy about it.
No. You just have to reform your government or leave your country, then you can have it back. I know that this isn't likely, but putting more pressure on the CCP is exactly what Apple could be doing here.
(Edit: The sibling comment thread already goes into detail on this idea.)
You're right that a clear dividing line is needed here. To be fair to Apple, though, they have given this official statement on the matter:
"As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It’s something we feel very strongly about."
It is perhaps notable that Apple is not trying to hide or deny this removal of VPN apps (not that they could really do that effectively). As long as Apple is open about its policies, then we have our clear dividing line (and it would be unreasonable to expect Apple to think of every conceivable future technological/policy question in advance).
Still, this is assuming that we can trust Apple to admit its policies, and moreover to consistently follow them, which even governments seem to have trouble doing. It would be nice to instead have technological ecosystems where end users and citizens didn't have to trust the policies and promises of powerful organisations.
> Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services.
Is there any reason for them to not automatically generalize this to "...with any entity from any country"? I'm wondering about a case where a government agency hides behind some other veil and makes Apple insert some backdoor.
Apple has shown the willingness to compromise to access the Chinese market, so there's absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't or haven't bow to their other demands, including the weakening of their device security.