The point is that the Chinese producers arrived early in the project. They came attached to the director, a full year before principal photography, including the largest state monopoly. And the US company (Legendary) was recently outright bought by a Chinese company. Given how thorough China is when it comes to the larger messages conveyed by feature films, I'm pretty certain they would never entered in force this project if they felt the film was demeaning in any way to China, even if the original script and project was originally developed by Americans and had "white savior" undertones. Plenty of time to scrub it off if needed. Having a white lead is thus obviously not an issue for them, and likely something they sought after. China is obviously trying to perfect its own industry and aims to have its very own worldwide box office sensation : they're plenty capable of doing similar and better films in that vein, save for high end VFX work but while there's an healthy market for them abroad, they're not yet able to compete with US blockbusters on the other key markets.
It doesn't invalidate the matter of diverse representation, the difficulties of Asian Americans in the US film industry or the discussion about how caucasians must be inserted at the front of any given story for commercial appeal, but that particular movie seems like a rather bad case study, to be honest : It's literally China pervading into the Hollywood machine and not the other way around. I stand to be corrected when we'll be able to judge the full story, but honestly I'm confident that the film will extoll the spirited daring combat by the chinese armies, how advanced their weapon technology is and the dignified leadership above the personal contributions of M.Damon's character.
