Suppose I'm Tim Cook and refuse to participate in the Chinese market. No iPhones for you. Who is hurt? Mostly Chinese people. They get a crappier phone with less security and privacy protection. I'm also hurt financially. There are a lot of people in China. Real people are getting hurt, and the political situation stays the same. Political change will happen in China when it does. It feels somewhat inevitable to me but one thing we can't do is force democracy on them. They have a lot of "anti-imperial" ideas in their culture due to many invasions from Japan and other western nations and for the idea of democracy and free markets to really take hold it needs to come naturally from China itself -- not through economic pressure from US companies.
