I’m wondering if this is a real threat, or a conspiracy theory. If it’s a real threat, wouldn’t be the same with the NSA?

A lot of these comments are downright unreasonable.

It’s important to evaluate your threat model critically. The average tourist (that isn’t going to Western China) or student is not a target for surveillance or data extrication attempts, especially firmware level attacks that are very specific to devices and are expensive to research and implement.

Companies tend to require employees to carry burner devices for international travel because that’s just good practice. You’re far more likely to lose your device when traveling, border officials have broad discretion to search for and access your devices, and companies tend to have high value information available to their devices past the corporate gateway, like trade secrets, technical designs, accounting records or employee data. That applies to any country, even Western countries.

Take your privacy seriously, but the notion that anything that touches Chinese soil means your devices are instantly compromised is a bit of a fallacious claim. Critically evaluate your role, the information you carry and why you might be the target of anything.

Anyways, as far as VPNs go - technically not illegal. Companies, universities, etc. all have sanctioned MLP gateways in Hong Kong to bypass the firewall. Every expat in China uses a VPN. There’s only one public case of anyone ever being arrested for using a VPN (and it was under a catch-all law), the others were all operators of ShadowSocks/V2Ray airports.

Tailscale and WireGuard is dicey in Mainland China. If you’re just a short term visitor, just buy a 3HK roaming sim for China and call it a day. As a best practice, you don’t really want to expose your self hosted services to the web anyways, so I would probably not even bother trying to VPN from a mainland connection directly.

I never got Plex or Jellyfin to work well on actual Mainland internet connections, simply because the Chinanet backbone that most people in China use is excruciatingly bottlenecked to the point that torrenting from other Chinese peers is just a much more pleasant experience.

When you enter China, you have to run their application on your phone to fill the immigration form. Way more convenient compared to the paper slip, right? 😉

It’s this https://apkpure.com/zhong-guo-ling-shi/com.gov.mfa

Luckily, you don’t need to install full malware but only medium malware, there’s a way to run it as a web app inside tencent WeChat by scanning a special qr code.

I run this stuff inside insular because tencent is tencent and even on fully patched Android 15 without any file access permission they still manage to drop fingerprinting files disguised as images in /pictures/.gs_fs0

For connecting to my servers, technically ssh on standard ports isn’t blocked (otherwise it would hurt their bots, no?) but I don’t want to show my server IP address, so I use a hysteria2 proxy hosted on a Oracle VM in the Japan datacenter. There are services like doggygo that rent access to those proxys for literal pennies (like $2 per month) but payment need to do with alibaba’s alipay or tencent wepay which is ultra traceable (linked to Chinese id+Chinese bank account+Chinese phone number) and very stupid. Honeypot?

There are reports of evil maid attacks where a secret service agent poses as room cleaner in your hotel room and tampers with your laptop when you’re away, but for normal people this seems unlikely. Keep your electronics with you at all times, always use a VPN, check hashes of executables if really need to run them (better not) and you’re going to be ok

Do not bring your normal personal devices to China. They are notorious for injecting spyware on foreign devices at every opportunity. Use a freshly formatted device and create all new accounts to use with it.

Regarding services: do not use self-hosted services unless you you spin up fresh, isolated instances of your services for use while abroad and spin them down afterwards, including formatting any OS they were hosted on.

Regarding VPN: because we are assuming that any device used in China is compromised, do not connect to your VPN unless you have set up a segregated VLAN and are connecting through a VPN server instance created specifically for use while in China.

Basically, assume anything you use in China is compromised. And assume your connections are being monitored. And assume that any device you are connecting to from China is at risk of being compromised. So everything needs to be segregated from the rest of your network and set up specifically to be deleted after you’re back home.

It’s definitely warranted as a random person.

See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/262444/should-i-worry-about-compromised-firmware-when-reinstalling-an-os from an admin point of view and also https://www.binarydefense.com/resources/blog/running-malware-below-the-os-the-state-of-uefi-firmware-exploitation/ for a technical discussion on how such compromises work and can survive even a new OS reinstall.

Also note that things like your mac address could be leaked out and collected (as per https://theprepared.com/forum/thread/turn-off-your-wifi-when-you-dont-need-it-and-other-tips-on-how-to-prevent-hacking-and-tracking/ ) though Apple specifically has a private mac address spoofing feature to combat this. A lot of this collection is automated, as to cast as wide a net a possible.

Get a new phone for use while traveling, then dump it when you’re back home. Leave your services behind.

Can I go to my public sites

I would not recommend. Remember, wherever you step, your feet are leaving traces. Your public sites may be a little too publicly well-known afterwards.

and/or VPN into my servers?

VPN’s might not work from there, or the use may be considered a crime.

If your device is out of your sight, then yeah, you should probably assume it’s compromised.

Of course, that’s hardly JUST China doing funky shit with your devices, but depending where you’re calling home, odds are customs/immigration when you head home will try to do the exact same thing, too.

And the answer to everything is yes, always use a VPN if you don’t trust the network and you should never trust the network.