I wonder if this isn't also an attempt to force Apple to give China access to the iOS and OS X source code.
Similar tactics were used in the past to force Microsoft to give the Chinese government access to Windows source code through the China Information Technology Security Certification Center (CNITSEC) Source Code Review Lab.
The US government has accused China of abusing CNITSEC's access to Windows to develop zero-day exploits for offensive use, so if that's true there's an ulterior motive there as well.
That's over and above the article's claim that the Chinese government wants to reduce the number of American tech firms' products in official Chinese government use.
Because like any program it is already compiled and they only have the executable to run. In its current state it is a bunch of machine code. They would have to reverse engineer it which is basically impossible across an entire operating system.
Large parts of OSX userspace (Frameworks, daemons and pretty much all the system applications) and some of the kernel are closed source. Almost all of iOS is closed.
Similar tactics were used in the past to force Microsoft to give the Chinese government access to Windows source code through the China Information Technology Security Certification Center (CNITSEC) Source Code Review Lab.
The US government has accused China of abusing CNITSEC's access to Windows to develop zero-day exploits for offensive use, so if that's true there's an ulterior motive there as well.
That's over and above the article's claim that the Chinese government wants to reduce the number of American tech firms' products in official Chinese government use.