A Chinese Film Shows What War Movies Usually Miss

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“Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” has drawn large audiences in Chinese cinemas, and for good reason. 

It tells a story Western cinema has visited many times — a foreign-led war in a fictional Middle Eastern country that unmistakably echoes Iraq — but from a perspective audiences rarely encounter. At its heart is a simple yet quietly radical idea: a Chinese restaurant and the human connections it sustains amid the ruins of conflict.

This is not an abstract meditation on war and peace. It is a story about specific people, specific choices and what happens when someone chooses to feed rather than fight. The film’s power lies in its particularity — in scenes that stay in the memory because they show rather than lecture.

The Restaurant and What It Does

The centrepiece is Loong Restaurant, a modest establishment that becomes a point of contact among American soldiers, local civilians, restaurant workers and orphaned children. Nothing grand. Just meals in a place where the normal rules of hostility briefly loosen. The metaphor is clear, but the filmmaking is not heavy-handed. The audience watches the meaning emerge.

The film draws on several real Chinese experiences in Iraq. One involved Liu Lei, later joined by Shuai Xuejun, who tried to move their restaurant business into Baghdad’s U.S.-controlled Green Zone. A contemporary account says Liu arrived at the checkpoint with an illustrated Chinese menu. It caught the guards’ interest and helped him gain entry to pursue the business inside. The door opened not through diplomatic protocol, but through food.

Another inspiration was Chen Xianzhong, whose Baghdad restaurant reportedly became a refuge for foreign journalists, local doctors, displaced children and others caught in the violence.

The film takes those fragments and builds something larger. It does not pretend the restaurant solves the war. Patrols continue. Violence continues. But, for a few hours, people who would otherwise meet across a divide share the same room. They eat. They recognise one another as human beings. Then the war resumes.

That is more honest than most war films manage. Hospitality does not heal every wound. Food does not end an occupation. The restaurant simply shows that war does not have to occupy every corner of human life. Ordinary life can survive, if only briefly.

What the Film Questions

One of the film’s bluntest lines asks an American officer: “Without you, where would the terrorists come from?”

The line is not simply an anti-military slogan. It asks a practical question about cause and consequence. If military action produces death, displacement and humiliation, can it also create the conditions in which radicalisation grows? If a family is destroyed, should anyone be surprised when grief becomes revenge?

The film does not offer a neat answer. It leaves the audience with an uncomfortable possibility: war can manufacture some of the enemies it later claims it must destroy. Military strategists have wrestled with that problem for decades. Yet many combat films treat the enemy as a fixed fact rather than a force shaped by intervention itself.

The second recurring line is quieter: “Still too salty. You still don’t understand the local taste.”

It comes when an outsider tries to cook for local people and fails. The exchange carries a broader political meaning. After the 2003 invasion, foreign officials attempted to rebuild Iraq’s institutions and political order according to plans devised elsewhere. The recipe was foreign. The consequences were local.

The historical parallel is direct. Soon after becoming the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer wrote privately: “I am now officially the government of Iraq.” The Coalition Provisional Authority then issued orders that removed senior Baath Party members from public employment and dissolved the Iraqi army and other security institutions. Hundreds of thousands were left without jobs or a clear future. These decisions were not the only causes of the insurgency, but they are widely regarded as major contributors to the collapse that followed.

The film asks a counterfactual question: what if outside powers had supported Iraqis in rebuilding their own country rather than imposing a political design upon them? What if they had listened to local tastes before insisting that their recipe was correct? The point is presented not as theory, but as a lesson in practical failure: institutions rarely gain legitimacy when they are imported whole.

What War Films Leave Out

The film’s approach differs from the familiar Hollywood combat narrative. Films such as “Saving Private Ryan” and “Black Hawk Down” are structured around the experience of American soldiers. They show courage, sacrifice and loss. Those experiences are real. But they are not the whole story of war.

“Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” turns towards the people living beneath the campaign: families, workers and children whose homes become battlefields. Although the country is fictional, its resemblance to Iraq is unmistakable.

The scale of Iraq’s civilian loss remains contested, and every estimate has limits. Iraq Body Count has documented between roughly 187,500 and 211,000 civilian deaths from violence since the 2003 invasion. In its analysis of attributed deaths, more than 15,000 were reported as having been caused directly by U.S.-led coalition forces. These are recorded deaths, not a complete measure of the war’s human cost.

Those numbers occupy little space in popular Western narratives. The lives behind them — the families destroyed, communities fractured and people drawn into conflict after losing almost everything — are more often background than subject.

A wedding scene in the film also recalls a fiercely disputed event in western Iraq. On 19 May 2004, Iraqi officials and survivors said a U.S. attack struck a wedding gathering near Mukaradeeb, killing 42 people, including women and children. The U.S. military denied targeting a wedding and said the site was being used by armed fighters. Video obtained by the Associated Press showed a wedding at the location hours before the raid, casting doubt on the official denial.

The film does not reproduce the event as documentary evidence. It does something cinema can do differently: it asks the audience to see the dead first as people — a family gathered to celebrate — rather than as numbers or the language of “collateral damage”.

What Comes After

The film’s final choice is its quietest. Years later, Xu Fu returns to the restaurant and discovers that Seif, the orphan he once taught to cook, has become its head chef. The ending does not declare victory. It shows continuity. A child who might have been consumed by war has built a life.

That scene can be read against the wider politics of reconstruction. Chinese companies have become major investors in Iraq’s energy and infrastructure sectors, financing or building projects that include power and transport facilities. This contrast — between military intervention and economic reconstruction — forms part of the film’s political afterlife, even though it is not the film’s literal conclusion.

Development, of course, is not free of power or self-interest. Chinese investment should be judged by its terms, costs and effects on local communities, just as Western intervention should be judged by its consequences. Roads and power plants are not acts of charity. But they create a different form of influence from tanks and air strikes: one grounded in construction rather than destruction.

The film’s deeper argument is therefore smaller than a geopolitical slogan and stronger because of it. Reconstruction matters only when it restores ordinary life: the ability to eat, work, raise children and shape one’s own future.

The restaurant cannot end a war. But it can reveal what peace is supposed to protect.

About the Author

Qaiser Nawab is Chairman of the Belt and Road Initiative for Sustainable Development and a cultural commentator whose work examines how cinema shapes understandings of war, conflict and international relations. He can be reached at qaisernawab098@gmail.com.

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China Iraq Film