This last point is a sad running joke throughout the film, as Kofman is constantly checking his account for that first deposit. It's never there, despite his ever-present optimism that this will be the day he finds money waiting. It's only four months into production, after he goes on strike — a work stoppage that lasts just a few hours and is mostly taken up by a much-needed nap — that he finally gets some money.
During that strike, Kofman's on-set translator expresses surprise: There is no striking in China. If you strike, you just get fired. Unmade in China is nominally about filmmaking, but what Kofman and Barklow do well is to use their unusual position within the Chinese state machine to make a thinly veiled movie about politics.
The expensive wining and dining necessary for the production to get party approval is used to show how Chinese communism runs on money and favor just as much as, if not more than, Western politics does. Male societal domination comes into play in the form of the misogyny that gets Kofman's initial cinematographer fired from the job, and via the script translator, who casually brags about having sex with the prostitutes hanging around the set.
That translator becomes a key figure, for he's presented not only as a generally hateful individual, but also as a shill for the party. He doesn't just translate the original English script, he rewrites it to reflect his own (and the party's) contempt for the perceived decadence of Gil and his American producers. The message is that this is merely one of the mechanisms by which every movie made under this system essentially becomes a propaganda film of some sort.
The perseverance shown by Kofman amid all of this is admirable, though the veins that begin standing scarily out in his forehead give Barklow and the viewer some concerns about whether he'll make it out of the process alive, let alone with a movie.
Winning against these odds is too much to expect — but shockingly, Kofman manages to tilt with foes more obstinate or surreal than any windmill, and battle them more or less to a draw.