This isn’t just a blow for the liberties of Apple’s customers in China. Authoritarian governments have a tendency to copy what works. Russia just passed a law curbing VPNs. Early this year, Apple pulled down The New York Times app in the Chinese App Store, and both Apple and Google removed the LinkedIn app from their Russian app stores. In the United States, President Trump has called for greater legal measures against the press. And he took the F.B.I.’s side in that fight over iPhones. What happens in China doesn’t stay in China.

It may be naïve to expect Apple to publicly take on the Chinese government. Sure, it may be the world’s most valuable company, with extensive investments and operations in China. But Apple is also just a foreign company — it must obey local laws, and it must watch for its bottom line. The Chinese market accounts for a quarter of Apple’s sales, and many analysts see the region as a key growth area for the company. So what was Apple supposed to do? Jeopardize its operations over a few apps?

What’s more, Apple’s silence isn’t unusual. While American tech companies frequently criticize decisions by American officials, they appear loath to do so in China. This weekend, Amazon also began banning VPN services from the Chinese version of its cloud-computing platform, called AWS. Facebook, has been exploring ways of getting into the Chinese government’s good graces. Google pulled many of its services out of the Chinese market in 2010, blaming censorship, but it has lately been mulling ways to get back.

There is also a moral defense of Apple’s decision to give in without a public fight: Despite the VPN ban, Chinese internet users might still be better off with Apple in China than with it outside. Its app store still provides people access to millions of apps that they might not find elsewhere in China. And Apple’s own communications apps in China remain free of government censorship. For instance, Messages, Apple’s texting app, and FaceTime, its video and phone-calling app, are protected by end-to-end encryption, allowing Chinese users to communicate freely.

But that may be of limited utility.

“It will only get worse,” said Xiao Qiang, a Chinese human rights activist and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. Mr. Xiao sees the latest crackdowns as the beginning of a new wave of internet censorship in China. And he doesn’t buy the argument that saying something publicly would have backfired for Apple.

“They should say something,” he said. “They are a U.S. company, after all. And they’re a global company, upholding standards of privacy and speech in many, many markets outside China. So if they have to do things differently in China, they should have some public explanation for why — because that attitude could matter globally, including in the U.S.”