Off the top of my head, theu can censor at the keyboard level, at the SMS level, and at the camera level: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/comments/pgk8y3/xiaomi_camer...

Yikes, yes: The Input Methods are totally under their (ROM's) control even if one uses a non-Xiaomi keyboard.

I don't think that camera thing was censorship, instead bug:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/comments/pgk8y3/comment/hbf5...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395885

Censorship of the Taiwanese flag by Apple on the iPhone for users in China manifested itself as a crash whenever the Taiwan flag emoji was used[1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-bug-iphon...

> But Wardle found that in some edge cases, a bug in the Taiwan-censorship code meant that instead of treating the Taiwan emoji as missing from the phone's library, it instead considered it an invalid input. That caused phones to crash altogether, resulting in what hackers call a denial-of-service attack that would let anyone crash a vulnerable device on command.

Which was also a bug—the conditions of which's existence are manifestly political (which I have zero desire/intent to defend here), but nonetheless an Apple-side bug that was patched eventually

Free tibet", long live Taiwan independence", or "democracy movement".

i sent this to a friend who owns a xiaomi phone and asked him to resent this back to me via sms. the message appeared just fine.

note: i am from india so this might not be enabled on the phones here for now

It may appear fine but your friend may be logged.

so what is the chinese government going to do to an indian who sent the text to someone ? force xiaomi to do something sinister to them?

Maybe keep getting scored until it reaches a certain threshold and gets marked for closer inspection of who the person is?

Android hacker community, like XDA, should be able to quickly reserve engineer this as more details surface

Maybe they just turn offenders along with the evidence over the the PLA, for "review."