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.
They said China interpreted the aliens wrong because they used Mahjong as the basis of their communication (🙄) so they would "inherently be competitive from using a competitive game." So when the aliens say "there is no time, use weapon" they interpreted that as a threat - but it was far more literal, there really isn't a thing we percieve as time and weapon was a misinterpretation of their word for their language.
I think in the background lore at some point the ships were attacked but they don't interact with the local environment at all, they don't exhaust anything and aren't affected by anything so presumably they were attacked at some point to find out that they weren't able to be attacked.
The US side was more like, there's the military wanting to press the nuclear button and then the egg head libs that are barely holding them back with a drip feed of progress.
I agree with OP, if the Arrival aliens actually came it would be the US who would interpret everything as a hostile act lol and they'd have the shorter hair trigger on launching nukes.