deleted by creator

Unfortunately, no, not really. They are absolutely able and willing to confiscate your devices at any time once you’re on Chinese soil, and once you’ve lost physical control, that’s the end of trust for that device. Even beyond that, it’s not unheard of for there to be vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc that make your device susceptible to wireless attacks. IMO it’s not worth the risk.

Here is just one example of this type of thing uncovered by The Guardian, New York Times, and others in a joint investigation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/chinese-border-guards-surveillance-app-tourists-phones

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.

There are lots of reasons to pirate stuff, but this argument in particular boils down to “We should steal stuff now because maybe some day in the future I won’t be able to use the paid version after they go out of business.” And that is shitty.

You bought it, so go crack it now that the license check is broken and nobody will care. That’s GOOD piracy. Support the creators, pirate when you can’t or it’s unreasonable to pay (more).

Don’t just pirate to mitigate theoretical future inconvenience. Do it to circumvent actual inconvenience, or to get things you couldn’t otherwise afford, or to say “fuck you” to big, shitty companies.

But pirating from a small-time dev just in case there are maybe license problems far in the future is not The Way