Spoilers for the movie, obviously.
How dare the US pretend like they would be the peaceful nation and that China would be belligerent the entire time. Don't get me wrong, it didn't stop me from enjoying the movie. The atmosphere, setting, plot, editing. Everything was so fantastic. The aliens, the themes about language and culture.
And I know that it was a US made movie with US main characters, but everytime they mentioned China being hostile felt so cringe. I doubt Villanueve was being intentionally anti-China, he just needed a non US ally to be belligerent so the protagonists would have a clock to race against. But even having Russia in that role would make more sense. And even weirder that China was ruled by a general from the People's Liberation Army.
Now this isn't me coming from a "China would never do anything bad" perspective. It's just silly pretending that the US wouldn't immediately send sidewinder missiles into that thing before it landed. The US would shoot first, second, and third before thinking to ask questions. The Chinese weather balloon tells us all we need to know about that. Now for the sake of the movie I was willing to accept the premise, but when it became all of the non West countries acting hostile it stung with me.
I think I'm only ranting because it was such a good movie and the whole theme of language being the key to understanding culture was undermined by making China the Bad Guys. If this was a shlockier, worse movie I wouldn't care to complain about that detail. I haven't read the original short story, but I'm sure that it didn't have this element.
I think that's the wrong take. It's been a year since I rewatched but isn't it implied that the US nuked China because they were making better progress in decoding?
I feel like the US is constantly described portrayed as arbitrarily hostile and belligerent
Nah, I think you're totally misremembering the film: not only does the US not attack/nuke China, at no point in the film is the US state portrayed as an initial or arbitrary aggressor. The film only shows the US "rationally" reacting to the aggression and secretiveness of other nations/parties. The film makes sure to show that the US only halts their communication/information-sharing with the other nations only after China and Russia have already themselves gone off the grid.
The only time US can even remotely be interpreted as an unprovoked aggressor was when the alien spacecraft that the main characters were at was bombed by US soldiers. Even then, the bombing was orchestrated by rogue Army grunts radicalised by Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorists - there's a scene near the 58-minute mark where a couple of soldiers in a medical tent are watching an internet video where some rando with a talk radio microphone rant about the alien contact being handled by "the same government that ruined our healthcare and bankrupted our military" and pushing for a preemptive "show of force" against the aliens, which sets up the implied motivation of the renegade soldiers - so that movie audience are reassured that American war crimes are just the unfortunate/unintended result of unwashed and uneducated individual bad apples in lower/middle echelons of the US military and that the eminently levelheaded leadership/intitutions of American military/state would never dream of recklessly provoking conflict for their material and/or strategic advantage...