Tuesday, Apple reported a 13% decrease in revenues for the quarter ended March 26.

Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, accounted for a stunning 58% of the drop.

CEO Tim Cook blamed currency appreciation in Hong Kong for the fall, but analysts generally thought that the saturation of the smartphone market in Mainland China had more to do with the disappointing results.

In any event, the Cupertino-based giant now faces a whole range of challenges in its second-largest market. Undoubtedly, the most important of them is that the Chinese government looks like it is now out to get the company and perhaps injure it grievously. In the middle of April, for instance, Beijing unplugged two Apple services.

China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television shut down Apple's iBooks and iTunes Movies. As the New York Times put it, SAPPRFT's decision was "startling."

The iconic American brand, most people believe, has not been targeted in Beijing's concerted attack on foreign companies, and some analysts do not read much significance into SAPPRFT's closures. John Butler of Bloomberg Intelligence, for instance, believes they were just examples of the Chinese government "policing content." "I don't think it's aimed at Apple," he said. "Apple is a hardware company and its lifeblood is not content."

That might be news to CEO Cook, but even if Butler were right, the two services were important because they pulled users into Apple's ecosystem.

And that ecosystem is in trouble at the moment. Canalys reports that in the last calendar quarter of 2015 the company was only No. 3 in smartphones in China with 12.5% of shipments. Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi Corp. each had shares of around 15%. Earlier in the year, Apple was No. 1.