On our ChinaTechNews.com, a commentary last week outlines Apple's 10+ years of failures in China and what the company must do to attempt to win in China. Among the advice, Apple must focus on its pricing and getting the iPhone legally into China.

This morning I also saw this piece from Mike Elgan who says:

China has an authoritarian government
One-party rule in China actually affects product quality. One example is that Apple will probably be required to disable the iPhone's Wi-Fi feature in order to comply with the Communist Party's strict Internet control and censorship rules.

I understand some of the background thinking on Mike's argument, but he doesn't add any of that background info to bolster his claim — he makes a few mental leaps to get to his conclusion. Also, I was under the impression that the two most important reasons why Wi-Fi was being turned off in many phones was because a) it competes with a dying Chinese standard called WAPI; and b) it directly competes with the CDMA and GPRS services sold by China Unicom and China Mobile, respectively.