Just a brief summary from a pro.

Modern laptops are built on chips that include hardware support for virtualization. There are bags of memory and disk space to spare.

If I were going to China for an extended period, I would install one of the VMWare supervisors on the bare metal laptop and install both Windows and at least one version of Linux to run in virtual machines. I would create backup images of the installed systems on the hard drive and I would also bring along an external drive containing additional backups. This should allow me to recover from almost any failure except the loss of both the laptop AND the external hard drive.

The trick with this is to make regular backups (at least weekly) so that you simplify your restore.

If that isn't robust enough for you, consider using a cloud provider to store additional backups. You probably want a China-based cloud provider to avoid crossing through the 'great firewall' as that could be a performance issue. (The Great Firewall won't scale up because it requires software running in big servers, eventually the Chinese Gov't will give up or fall behind the western world).

Eventually, we'll all be using 'the Cloud' and our PC's and laptops or tablets will just be networked access devices.

Through Dense Wave-Division Multiplexing, there will be almost limitless bandwidth available. Currently fibre optic transmission systems supports channels running at 10 Gigabits per second. That's 10,000 times faster than the 1 Mbps DSL modem of the year 2000. With DWDM, there can be several hundred different 'colours' of laser beam employed and each of these carries data at 10 Gbps. I am also lying about it because support for 40 Gbps and even 100 Gbps is becoming quite common. Google for 'Emerald Atlantis' to see the progress of the most modern transatlantic cable systems.

DWDM systems can also be switched in 'the optical domain' which means there is no conversion to electrical bits that travel through microprocessors. The signals are added and dropped using refraction.