Don't go to the US. That's the tip.
My general advice for people travelling to China is to not talk about politics on Chinese social media, or if you do just talk about the domestic politics of your home country & keep in mind that Chinese people might disagree with you. That's also my advice for people travelling to any country, but it's more important in China.
All that said, if you must discuss politics on Chinese social media while you're there, the thing the censors really have an issue with is calls for action, explicit or implied. More than one very pro-PRC heritage speaker who went to China has had their Weibo posts raging against America or Japan censored because they thought the criteria were "Posts have to be pro-China", when really the criteria is "Posts can't be a call to collective action that wasn't started by the party". What the party is actually concerned about is just stopping any sort of organised mass movement that they didn't start. The CCP's point of view is that mass movements are inherently unpredictable & could lead to civil disorder (even if they're nominally "pro-China"), so they're too risky a tool to let anyone other than the state use - important context to that is that Chinese culture, similar to some other East Asian cultures, puts way more value than we do on civil order, harmony etc.
Also if your posts do get censored, it's not as big an issue as it would be here. Where I live, the government deleting my social media posts would feel approximately as serious as armed police rappelling through my windows, and if the former happened I'd at least think about the possibility of the latter happening shortly afterwards. Think something like the Christchurch shooting live feed. It's not like that in China; it's completely normal, for example, that you get angry & post something that gets deleted by a censor, & that is literally the last you ever hear of it, a lot like tweeting something against ToS. If you continue posting about it or try to get around the censorship, eventually a police officer will visit you and talk to you over tea about why you have to stop doing that, and if you keep going that's when the actual legal consequences like deportations or arrest start.
In 2025 if you are a public person saying it you will get consequences. See Hobhouse case.
There are other people like John Cena apologizing for saying something "wrong" in English but no idea if they were threatened by CCP or by their managers
Yes, if your criticism of China is in the news they might not let you in. That doesn't apply to many people but it's still a helpful clarification.
>There are other people like John Cena apologizing for saying something "wrong" in English but no idea if they were threatened by CCP or by their managers
Managers, and the reason isn't out of fear of legal consequences but fear of boycotts. Chinese have often felt like those in the West are talking down to them or being condescending, and they've never in their life had the ability to affect those doing so. Now that people really want access to the Chinese market, it's the first time ever for many Chinese people that they feel they can have any impact on how Westerners talk about China or the Chinese people. As a result (and because China has domestic equivalents of everything), Chinese people can be very boycott happy. The government can stop Chinese people from organising boycotts & very often does so (once again, they have an issue with any sort of mass organising by default), but the government can't force people to buy tickets to John Cena's movies & they didn't view it as appropriate to censor the videos of him screwing up what he meant to say. An organic boycott by the Chinese market is the worst nightmare of a lot of businessmen because the future of their business relies on selling in China, so they'll be even more strict on their people than the Chinese government would to try to avoid that.
Short of time travel, this seems impossible.
Now you have to hope that 20 years later people on social networks won't suddenly decide that "golden retrievers" is a dog whistle for something bad, which would make your accounts retroactively problematic.
Just lasagna pics, birthday cakes, kittens, golden retrievers, baby goats, maybe an artsy photo of a leaf with #blessed.
Everything I can do so that an AI running immigration background checks might match my kids to the profile of a low threat, emotionally well-regulated, consumer-minded citizen material.
Absolutely no pictures of Winnie the Pooh to keep China travel option open too.
I welcome any tips. Someone here must have cracked the code to be completely unremarkable and "wholesome" to governments.