I'm going to China tomorrow and have already prepared a laptop and phone which I plan to keep just for work trips abroad. I'm the owner of a small hardware startup (less than $1m revenue per year but not an insignificant amount, no employees on the books so it looks like a one man band to anyone looking, and we are not in the security sector so it's nothing sensitive) and am going to China on a business visa in order to carry out assembly operations as well as find a logistics partner, which the government is aware of as it's written in my visa application.
A lot of manufacturing I'm doing already takes place in China, so they have a lot of the designs for products I make. However they don't have access to my financial records for example, emails, etc. and I am anonymous to a lot of my suppliers, some of whom are my direct competitors, to prevent them knowing what the component they are making actually is/what it's being used in.
At the moment, I am making do with a burner email account that has all my emails redirected to it for the trip, which will only be accessed through a phone with GrapheneOS. I have a linux machine which will be used just for hardware and software development. All important files are stored on an encrypted USB (could change this to cloud storage but not sure what's better, also I have passport scans on the USB which I don't really want to upload to the cloud ideally).
However, ideally I want to access my Shopify account and I need to submit my invoices to my accountant every month. I also want access to my email archive, and also access to the company VPN (we have our ticket system and management software on it). I will be in China for longer than a month for sure. I can forego the above but it will make my life way harder and I will be relying on employees for one time codes, showing me the Shopify, etc. Also the servers on the VPN are self hosted, and it's all through tailscale, I set the VPSes up myself so they are not hardened at all and I wouldn't trust myself to do it properly either.
My questions is, given my profile, what threats should I be worried about? Suppliers/government actors trying to get physical access to my machine, or am I being paranoid? Is my current set up overkill? What risks do I face in terms hacking over the network, what data is potentially at risk? I am also traveling the majority of the year, so if I can make concessions, I would be grateful, as this will be my set up for a lot of it.
Thanks for reading if you got this far!
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