What a Chinese blockbuster says about Beijing’s view of the world

It begins with a montage of horror scenes, with a dead body dragged across the ground, its head still bleeding, and terrified women and children lining up to board a bus to somewhere unknown. But the opening credits roll above the most sumptuous images of knives slicing through mushrooms, onions and peppers while shrimp, chicken and vegetables sizzle in all their succulence at the scorching bottom of an orchestra of woks.This is Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, a film that has been at the top of the box office charts in China for the past six weeks, grossing more than €300 million already. Unusually for a Chinese anti-war film, it is set abroad and puts the experience of Arab victims of US foreign policy, and the jihadism that it generated in response, at the centre of the story.The film stars Shen Teng, China’s leading comic actor, as a chef called Xu Fu who travels to the Middle East in 2002 in the hope of earning enough money to pay off his debts and support his mother and daughter. The location is not identified but it is clearly Baghdad and Xu gets a job as head chef at a Chinese restaurant owned by a senior Baathist government official.A few months after he arrives, the Americans start bombing the city and the film portrays vividly the brutal and chaotic impact of the aerial bombardments that Washington and its allies celebrated at the time as surgical strikes. Xu and his restaurant are at first among the beneficiaries of the war, attracting everyone from rich locals to the American forces from the Green Zone with his exceptional food.READ MOREBut when Xu’s business partner is implicated in a paramilitary attack on US forces, he is taken to an American prison and torture site, along with a Chinese colleague and a local teenage orphan Xu is training as an apprentice. After months of cruel treatment by the Americans, they are abducted by the jihadis to a training camp for young suicide bombers until Xu tries to help some of the children to escape.Wen Muye speaking following a screening of his movie Once Upon a Time in the Middle East at a cinema in Beijing, China. Photograph: EPA Like their counterparts in Hollywood, Chinese film-makers have used the Middle East and Africa as backdrops for manifestations of the strength, heroism and derring-do of their soldiers. But in Xu, a small-business owner hoping to make some money far from home, this film has found a protagonist that more accurately reflects the reality of Chinese interaction with the global south.Much western commentary views Chinese cinema mainly through a geopolitical lens and sees its film-makers as servants of a national ideological project. But most Chinese artists, including film-makers, are practising their art with as much creativity, imagination and individuality as their western equivalents, but within different externally imposed limits.Wen Muye, who directed Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, is among the Chinese film-makers who have put social commentary at the centre of their work. His 2018 film Dying to Survive was a comedy about patient activism to secure access to affordable drugs to treat leukaemia, which also put undistinguished, flawed people at the centre of the action.Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is based on a number of true stories about Chinese people who moved to the region and opened restaurants, some of which survived every war.“Food, above all, represents happiness and peace,” Wen said after the film opened.[ Trump’s red carpet welcome for Xi shows how much the world has changedOpens in new window ]“Even amid the chaos of war, people still need three meals a day. It may sound simple, but in coming into the world and leaving it, in sickness and old age, what people ultimately care about are these most basic things: having a good meal and taking care of their families.”This worldview, with its lack of ideology and its avoidance of moral judgments on regional partners, reflects China’s current foreign policy stance. It has put aside, for the most part, the angry tone of much of its diplomatic rhetoric in the first half of this decade, exploiting the country’s power of attraction alongside the threat of its coercive strength.Despite all the signs that Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is set during the Iraq War, Wen declines to identify the conflict it portrays beyond admitting that it was more than 20 years ago.“The story is set 20 years ago, but I didn’t want to limit it to any particular war,” he said. “Audiences can see it as a story about war and humanity – one that could have happened in the past, or could be happening right now.”