Seriously; going through the Chinese border is much nicer experience than those two declining and/or former empires: USA and UK.
They do not care about what is on your laptop. The Chinese block Facebook and al to prevent Chinese en masse joining Facebook; they don't care that a few westerners check up on dogs or complain about missing toilet paper using some VPN/SSH-thingee.
Are they likely to be hassled at the border? No. But if there's a way to make all parties happy, might as well document it.
If they really cared, they wouldn't host it on Linux. It would be OpenBSD or something with every software measure possible on read-only storage that admin physically replaces. That's just to start with. It's good that the author is taking measures but it gets amusing how much risk they keep on distribution side when you bring up nation-states going after them. Most big ones have 0-days for Linux systems anyway. They just use them in a targeted fashion to get more ROI from them. China can probably hit anyone working for Linux Foundation if they wanted to outside some really, paranoid setups that might exist.
They just don't since they don't care about them. They're 100% unimportant to Chinese intelligence. What is important is the source code of the kernel and privileged software which are freely available. If anything, letting Linux development and distribution continue is a good thing for Chinese intelligence since developers add features (and vulnerabilities) more than do code audit on a project whose source is available to the black hats. Makes Chinese spies' jobs so much easier. :)
The US is quite different, far from welcoming, it's scary, so many bad stories of things happening, the immigration people trend to scowl (they must be under so much pressure) they take your photos, your fingerprints (not entering China) ... honestly, as much as I love the US, it's my home I've spent half my adult life there, I'm not going out of my way to visit these days
> It is important to point out that you are extremely unlikely to be penalized for bringing in an encrypted laptop with you to China, as any kind of widespread zealous application of such practice would quickly shut down any business travel to China -- and this is definitely not in the government's interest.
In the US's case, it might mean that the world depends too much on it and has to put up with draconian policies.
Just a wild guess, but like many people have said in this discussion: I find it pleasant to go to China, but I have to be paid to go to the US.
Hopefully the US will sort itself out and people can be happy visitors again, and not simply go there because it's normal to do so.