Oh yeah, I'm not saying it's the same thing, just that Apple has to concede to the laws of countries it trades in. It's crap, and they can complain all they want, but if it passes, there isn't much they can do about it other than pulling out of that territory. The US system is actually much better in this regard in that they can throw lobbyists at the government to try and block it.
I disagree, the Chinese law the article talks about explicitly demands access to encryption keys, "A tabled counter-terrorism law will force almost all foreign tech companies in the country to provide source code and
encryption keys for inspection, and install backdoors to allow surveillance access." It then goes on to say that Apple has almost certainly
not done that. I'm saying, that the way iMessage is engineered, they couldn't even if they wanted to. Given that they haven't offered and can't give the Chinese the encryption keys they are after, this is an example of Apple explicitly
not following the current law of a sovereign nation. There is some wiggle room here however, as the article talks about a, "tabled law" and uses the future tense, so it's
possible the law is still in the drafting stages.
Now it could be that in the end Apple caves and reconfigures iMessage in China, removing end-to-end encryption but there's no evidence in that article (that I saw) that they have done as of yet.