[kyriakos]

I did buy two Xiaomi phones for members of my family. They are really good for the price when compared to more mainstream brands. They also have strong community support and both models I tried have unofficial Cyanogenmod firmware. To be honest though other than the possible "spying" from the Chinese ROMs, Xiaomi's MIUI is beautiful, well thought, and gets updated every week.

[pawadu]

Given that all phones are manufactured in China, I would say that ship has already sailed. But I am an equal opportunity guy - if NSA is spying on me it is only fair to let the Chinese in too :)

More seriously, since these phones are often bought from "gray market" vendors, I am more worried about cybercriminals planting malware in them when they are imported:

http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/07/security-firm-finds-pre-in...

[rahimnathwani]

This article says that xiaomi has started shipping phones with locked bootloaders for this reason: http://www.xda-developers.com/xiaomi-locks-bootloaders-unloc...

[jb613]

> if NSA is spying on me it is only fair to let the Chinese in too :)

I never understand this self-defeatist mentality. One represents a democracy while the other represents a communist dictatorship. If you trust them so much why not just move there and become a citizen :-) I mean, I hear there's lot of jobs have moved there the past ~decade.

[olalonde]

Or you could say that one has a recent history of imperialism and militarism while the other is relatively peaceful and non interventionist.

[jb613]

squelching any internal dissent, creating islands in the ocean to hold military bases to takeover an entire section of the world, manipulating currency, providing infrastructure to carry out corporate and nation state espionage, etc... - these are what you consider "relatively peaceful and non interventionist"?

[qihqi]

You mean Guam, US Dollars and NSA?

[jb613]

Don't put words in my mouth. I was disputing the notion that China is "relatively peaceful and non interventionist". I purposely stayed away from the comment of "imperialism and militarism" of the U.S.

In contrast, your examples: 1) have nothing to do with China, 2) suggest that two wrongs make a right.