I know Xiaomi is not the best brand to buy for privacy, but I consider their products one of the best in terms of value for money
I own a few Xiaomi devices, I simply install Blokada on each one of them and I think you would be surprised by how many non Chinese domains it blocks, Google being one of the worst offenders.
EDIT 2: paradoxically knowing that Xiaomi is a Chinese company make buyers more aware of the privacy risks involved. It breaks that false sense of security associated with electronic devices that many people believe in.
About your second edit: If you live anywhere on earth that isn't in the geographical area of China it would likely be better to have data going to China than the big US corps. For most it is unlikely the data could be used against you in anything from ads to a police raid, unlike with something like Google collecting it where it will almost for sure be used and useful.
I hear this a lot, but it strikes me as being short sighted. That only works if the status quo remains so forever. Maybe 5 or 10 years from now, relations between the Chinese and US governments gets cozier, and part of their deal includes sharing of this kind of data.
Or maybe the US government knows it can't legally collect certain information on its own citizens, but can rely on China to collect it, and then purchase it from the Chinese government.
Then there's the overall argument against: I don't want any government collecting data about me, period. It's none of their damn business, regardless of the chances of me having to interact with them in any capacity.
The pessimist in me assumes that's because it's a good cover for the intelligence agencies data sharing agreements between the US, China, India, Russian, North Korea, et al.
There are a lot of binaries other than Android that run on Smartphones that you cannot possibly control from within Android even with fully-privileged apps (let alone restricted user-space apps). And, even within Android, because Blokada doesn't support "Block connection without VPN", there's no guarantee that apps don't bypass the VPN it sets up. Besides, Blokada leaks DNS requests over TCP (only handles the UDP ones) [0]. All of this is discounting the fact that Blokada has a hard-coded list of applications it blanket allows by-default [1].
Also, these fingerprinting bits in their code-base doesn't inspire confidence either [2][3].
I'd not consider Blokada a serious security app at this point, though it does have the potential to be one.
I know Xiaomi is not the best brand to buy for privacy, but I consider their products one of the best in terms of value for money
I own a few Xiaomi devices, I simply install Blokada on each one of them and I think you would be surprised by how many non Chinese domains it blocks, Google being one of the worst offenders.
EDIT:
see this screenshot
https://imgur.com/a/UO0BGCy
EDIT 2: paradoxically knowing that Xiaomi is a Chinese company make buyers more aware of the privacy risks involved. It breaks that false sense of security associated with electronic devices that many people believe in.