I was asked about two countries on my list. China was not one of them, in spite of the fact that me GE interview took place when I'd held four consecutive year-long multi entry visas for the mainland and had been going 4-5x/year.
First, the officer why I was in Singapore, to which I asked him which time, while trying to recall why I'd gone to Singapore. I remembered that my previous two visits were an industry summit and a small local conference. Singapore kind of threw me for a loop, since Singapore is such a close ally of the USA. It's one of the few countries that is allowed to buy pretty advanced weaponry from American arms companies (the others that come to mind are Israel and Taiwan).
After that was out of the way, he asked why I'd been to the UAE, which I fully expected. I'd been invited to speak at a conference where I was in the midst of Nobel laureates and other famous people. (I was a comparative unknown, but the conference still paid for business class on Etihad, which was very nice.)
I got the impression he was killing time until the fingerprint check was done. Although they don't tell you that they're running fingerprints, they do. After I came up clean, the CBP officer said something like "you'd be surprised how many people we catch when we fingerprint them for GE and find arrest warrants."
Totally low-stress. I was in and out of the parking lot in 53 minutes, and that includes about 15 minutes of waiting for the officer to show up and boot up his computer. I was the first interview of the day.