This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.
Security concerns you need to think about when visiting the US are absolutely no less than those when visiting China these days. Treat it like a totalitarian dictatorship with more technological means.
*Unless you are (well) known dissident/journalisy/politician.
US is much more totalitarian than China. Lived in China for years, had multiple times various visa/residence permit issues with police and guess what, nobody cared about my electronics or was sending me to any detention, all I've got were quie helpful officers trying to find workarounds for me to deal with the situation.
Same thing on my last trin in summer 2025, we didn't stay in hotel, didn't go to register to police as you are supposed to and when crossing province border checkpoint guess what happened - they let us go to our tourist sight and told us to just register after weekend and as usual officers in police station couldn't care less, they just registered us without any issues.
You can complain about plenty things in China, there sure is a lot of bureaucracy but when you actually have to deal with them, they are pretty laidback and trying to be helpful usually.
By these standards and my experiences with registration in police stations in other two EU countries I can tell you China was the friendliest most laidback and convenient experience.
People who claim China is totalitarian dictatorship clearly never been to China and should get off their high horse, China nowadays make less trouble for their own citizens than EU hating them trying to make lives of EU citizens as inconvenient and expensive as possible.
Were you a Caucasian in China? Foreigners, particularly those from powerful Western countries, tend to get much more deferential treatment than locals.
Obviously, if you do your research you will not go as black (partly also brown) person to China/Japan/East Asia unless you have any other option (though I guess students from poor African/*stan countries don't have many options).
I would disagree with different treatment compared to locals vs whites. It's not like whites/foreigners have only benefits, good luck booking ANY hotel (I guess this improved since visa free policy) or renting an apartment as foreigner, which was a shit show or even good price in some markets in past (this was solved by online shopping). But you will get definitely different treatment as white foreigner vs "darker the skin worse the treatment" foreigner.
police sure, but I was talking about racism in general in whole society and potential preferential treatment
China in general for anyone would be safer than US regarding street crime, not so sure about food/air safety, which was one of the main reasons why we left after kid was born
In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.
For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.
There seemed to be a tacit agreement between the people and the Chinese oligarchy: if you let those in power just keep doing what they want, they'll just ignore you.
However, China is a pendulum. It was very much the opposite at the time of Tienanmen Square; from the late 90s into the 10s there was quite a lot of freedom; but now with Xi's power having been consolidated, it's swinging back toward authoritarianism again. I've seen people describing more recent conditions there as the start of Cultural Revolution 2.0.
> In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.
in general I would agree (also pretty low taxes for small businesses and employees), but:
> For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.
this is bad example, chengguans are infamous for scaring away street sellers, which is one of the reasons why people operate their business from (electric) tricycles, so they can get away, when you see chengguans are coming they will disappear quickly same as those blanket sellers in the West, alternatively in evening you will see car trunks open with people selling their stuff from there, but it also depends where you are, I'd assume Beijing is the strictest since in BJ suburbs where I was staying last summer this didn't seem to change much over last 10-15 years
I used to work (among others) in Xi'erqi subway station neighborhood (Xiaomi HQ) and what happened around the station is happening all across China - cleaning streets/gentrification, there used to be huge market next to subway station where you could buy all kinds of food and things from street sellers, but when I was leaving they effectively shut it down. Same thing happened at my parents in law town, though it's not so strict in BJ suburbs, people still operate from sidewalk, but there used to be for instance nice bakery market which was shut down, same with small local police station, now everyone needs to go to big central one and many other (small) places shut down, while city keeps growing. So they are clearly cleaning the streets and regulating street sale especially in Beijing. Though when I walked last summer around my other workplace across CCTV in CBD (downtown) there was guy operating from relatively big folding trailer, but I guess he has permit, didn't see any jianbing/jidanguanbing small sellers on sidewalk as I used to frequent on the way to work.
I agree China around 2010 was peak China when it comes development balanced with freedom, I remember how we thought upcoming Xi will open China even more, we couldn't be more wrong... On the bright side at least now you can go 30 days visa free to China, which is a bug positive compared to past, 30 days should be already quite enough even for regular tourist to cover China, those previous 15 visa free days was pretty much useless.
Beijing/Hebei, I've done paperwork/lived long term only in these two regions, worked on business trips in more provinces, but don't have any experiences with bureacracy over there other than HK where you have to go if problem with visa
Maybe marginally, but I'm still not visiting any county where I would be in trouble if the government/police knew my opinions of them. That's not just the obvious ones like US, Russia and China, but also countries like Thailand, Egypt, UAE, Israel to name a few. I like seeing the world, but not that much.
In China I would expect to be kicked out for having the wrong opinion as long as I didn't cause a big fuss. In the US I'd worry about being imprisoned.
China is known to hold Canadians on the excuse of being spies… spying for them is oftentimes filming without prior approval in non coastal but still civilian regions.
> According to a report by The Globe and Mail in November 2023, Spavor sought a multimillion-dollar settlement against the federal government for involving him in espionage activities without his knowledge. Spavor alleged that he provided Michael Kovrig with intelligence on North Korea, which Kovrig then secretly gave to the Canadian government and its Five Eyes allies without Spavor's permission, leading to their arrest and detention
Americans, too. My understanding is that there are a couple of hundred Americans being detained in China now. Some of these people are expatriates who gave up their PRC citizenship for American but China still claims to have dominion over (for what that's worth), but at least some have no colorable argument at all.
I'm surprised that we don't hear more about this from the American government and media.
Chinese train infrastructure also had a lot more casualties than any modern Western nation, even with a conservative estimate of the covered up ones. Building fast is a lot easier if you can break some eggs.
I was not impressed when I was sent there on business trip, from what I remember their subways were not as big as in Beijing or other CN places and I hit there my head, obviously anything is better than HK/London. Normally I'm not claustrofobic, but in HK subway...
Something I think is funny is that a lot of Chinese police think of themselves as catching up to the US in terms of surveillance tech. Think about how many internal migrant workers China has coming to the cities for work then back out to the rural areas.
I haven't been to the US since Trump first got elected, but even before that, immigration agents often seemed oddly adversarial, whereas immigration agents in China just don't really seem to give a shit.
From what I read about them (never had the honour and pleasure of interacting with one) it seems for some time they have had too much power with almost zero accountability and consequences.
I wouldn't say you are overreacting at all. I know someone who was detained for months on US soil after a phone search where the only "evidence" against him they found is illegal content sent by someone else to him on a group chat he doesn't even check. Had to get a lawyer and spend time in prison just waiting to be deported back.
Insulting people is a crime in Germany. If you said "Hitler was a poopy head" that'd be illegal. But they wouldn't bother to enforce that. If you say it about a real person, they can press charges.
fyi: insult is a so called "Antragsdelikt". That means authorities can only press charges when the victim files an official complaint. Otherwise they can't do anything.
Which also means they wouldn't be able to do anything about you saying "Hitler was a poopy head".
My dad's eighty+ years old, he was born in the States, though he did give up his citizenship. He brings a "fake" phone when visiting family, he's been doing so for years.
Me; I just change all my tabs and recent history to slightly kinky porn and truth social. They do look hard, but they don't look hard.
The US is first world on a technicality: the first world is defined as countries that were allied with the US during the cold war. If not for that, it'd be classified as developing.
It's common to mix up developing/developed and third/first world because they were largely aligned during the cold war. But there is one first-world developing country.
The biggest economy in the world and the richest country to have ever existed is not a developing country, although it is quite unequal. What you've stated is political rhetoric that you want others to accept as fact.
Many developing countries have extreme inequality. What would it look like if the whole world's reserve currency accidentally ended up being the South African Rand?
The behavior of the us is so stupid and self-destructive I'm constantly amazed that the average trump supporter doesn't see it. But the failure of the political resistance to him is the real surprise. If your buddies have the majority in the house and the senate there nothing you can do?
This is not true. However, because of the massive inequality, I often found it easy to use a sentence I saw somewhere: "the US is a South American country that happened to become successful".
As much as the current situation in the US upsets me, anyone who has spent considerable time within the US and outside of the US cannot believe what you've stated as anything other than a trite delusion. The US isn't just the richest country in the world, it has the second highest purchasing power parity per capita in 2026 and historically the highest. The average person in Mississippi is economically better off than the average person in England.
I used to love visiting the US. I have many friends there, and I really enjoy staying in places like Seattle and SF. But I haven't gone there since Trump 1.
That said, I think protecting your privacy is a good idea in general.
... which by now is a banana republic of the worst kind. Can you interact sanely with an insane counterpart? Avoiding to visit would be my recommendation too.
European citizens can travel in the EU without even noticing that they are crossing borders most of the time. I once got lost on my bike and accidentally ended up in France for example.
And if you're unpopular enough, they can also abuse arrest warrants for political persecution from another country. Case in point, captain Tommy Olsen from Norway, who Greek authorities accused of "human trafficking" for helping boat refugees.
They've deliberately made it very easy to request arrests across borders, so it isn't all rosy. One of the reasons it really sucks for everyone when an EU country starts slipping towards fascism.
Australia has stricter screening for fruit than for people.
don't bring anything organic to Australia unless it's been commercially processed, and even then show it to the border officers so they can make the call. You don't get penalized for showing them something not allowed, you just can't bring it into the country, and they throw it in the bin for incineration. Penalties start when you try to sneak something in anyway.
An Australian sniffer dog was very interested in my rucksack when I visited Australia a while back. Apparently it was due to previously having kept some bananas in there. They really don't mess about with finding and fining people importing anything that could germinate. They are very friendly though and one officer even washed some seashells that my wife found in New Zealand.
Australia has very one sided arrangements with some other places. It is far easier for Aussies to get into the UK than vice versa, for example. They get in visa free, but UK citizens need a visa.
I have an Australian acquaintance who got into trouble recently since he was born in Scotland but moved to Australia as a child. He is about as Aussie sounding as they come and went to school there, but after working in the UK for a year or two, Australian immigration gave him grief when he decided to return.
Australians actually comprise one of the biggest groups of illegal migrants in the UK, but they are more rarely commented on as they are much less visible than certain other groups. Australians with a parent or grandparent from the UK qualify, whereas those who don't, don't. But the ones who don't are rarely deported, and can't be easily distinguished in many cases.
> I have an Australian acquaintance who got into trouble recently since he was born in Scotland but moved to Australia as a child.
He's not a member of ACDC is he? ;)
I think many in the UK don't really regard Aussies or Kiwis as "immigrants" at all. I have various red faced in-laws with political views that are, shall we say, to the right of centre and they see Aussies as just Brits with funny accents.
But yes, if you had someone whose UK ancestor back in the 19th century, or descended from Italians, Greeks or Lebanese, with an Aussie accent, then you're unlikely to be a suspect.
Schengen (and Nordic countries) logs your biometrics and can search your electronics [0] when you enter the region.
Canada searches electronics [1].
Japan Article 105 (Inspection, Search, and Seizure) of the Japan Customs Act (Kanzeihō) allows electronic searches.
It’s strange how much criticism America gets, yet when people are confronted with problems in their own countries, the response is often, “Donald Trump bad. American stupid for voting for him.” The U.S. was surveilling phones long before Trump became president, and the practice certainly continued under Biden.
