For the UK:
Oxford requires a TOEFL score no less than 110, and I ended up at 108 after several trials. The funding situation is also up in the air, but it seems to me the CSC is the best chance for the majority of Chinese applicants. (already declined).
IC firstly offered the CSC-Imperial Scholarship, and I finally survived to win the President Scholarship (purely application form based, no interview). The PI has good reputations from his students and is to some extent famous in my research field. Another merit of IC is I can decide the Ph.D. topic by myself.
For the US:
The only offer I got in the US is from Cornell since I did not pre-contact any PI in the US and Cornell MAE indeed enrolls students by the committee. I believe one of my journal paper helped because an esteemed professor at Cornell MAE serves as Associate Editor of the journal, and he mentioned my work during the campus visit.
I was also contacted by professors from UMich and Purdue, who are Tsinghua alumni. Our research fields are not that matched. Thus I failed the interview at UMich and declined the interview at Purdue. No interviews from other universities.