Beijing almost certainly can ratchet up or dial down the nationalist fervor by manipulating social and traditional media. But the Apple-to-Huawei movement has a bottom-up grassroots feel not so different, say, from US efforts in the 1970s to boycott grapes that relied on underpaid labor or European moves against GMOs and companies such as Monsanto. With the near-constant stream of invective against China coming from Washington, those domestic Chinese responses should not be surprising.

That makes Apple even more vulnerable should Xi Jinping and his government decide to target Apple explicitly in retaliation for the attempts of the Trump administration (and the Obama administration before it) to curtail, if not halt, Huawei’s ability to compete in the US and the West. The list of potential reprisals is long, starting with constraints on Apple’s retail stores and perhaps requiring Apple to use different or approved components such as domestic Chinese chip sets.

But it gets worse. The government could make it harder for Chinese citizens who bought Apple products to access the App Store, or place onerous conditions on Chinese and foreign developers—though with millions of Chinese developers, that would also hurt their domestic economy. Other countries ranging from Saudi Arabia to Russia already have tested out such methods quite successfully, revoking licenses (not Apple’s) or placing restrictions and conditions that make it all but impossible for certain businesses to function.

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And then there are even more drastic options: The government could simply ban the sale of iPhones in China using the same justifications that the US is using against Huawei: national security and data security. While Apple is not a major defense contractor and has in fact tangled with Washington and the FBI over encryption, the Chinese could simply say that the presence of foreign hardware and security-protected operating systems violate its laws about data security and its right to access citizen data. Such arguments would be flimsy legally, but perhaps not much flimsier than the evidence provided so far that Huawei is actively in collusion with the Chinese government.

Interestingly, Ren Zhengfei, the founder and CEO of Huawei, has explicitly opposed attempts in China to boycott or curtail Apple. "Apple is the world's leading company. If there was no Apple, there would be no mobile internet," Ren said last week. "Apple is my teacher, it's advancing in front of us, as a student why should I oppose my teacher?" For sure, such noble sentiments carry self-interested motives; defending Apple on principle is also a way to insist that Huawei be treated fairly by the Americans. But Ren’s views notwithstanding, the Chinese government does not share his sentimentality.

These moves could, as Wall Street analysts have recently warned, not only slash Apple’s China business but significantly impact its overall profitability. And that is without Beijing attacking the heart of Apple’s supply chain, which is centered in and around Shenzhen and depends heavily on the manufacturer Foxconn. Disrupting that would cause much more pain than squeezing Apple in the domestic Chinese market, but it would also cause significant pain for the domestic Chinese economy and would be a move toward mutually assured economic destruction. It’s possible, sure, but likely? Not yet.

The vulnerability of Apple’s business in China is only one example of the unintended consequences of this expanding trade conflict. Apple is simply the most visible of hundreds of US companies selling hundreds of billions of goods to Chinese consumers, partly offsetting the tide of Chinese imports to the US: Nike, Starbucks, KFC, Ralph Lauren, Boeing, GM, and so on. China has barely begun to exert its leverage in response to Trump’s tariffs. It would be unwise to assume that its inaction to date is a harbinger of inaction in the future, and these scenarios should give anyone pause who argues that China has more to lose than the United States in this contest.

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