Joephy Chan says the film provides an object lesson in the superiority of peaceful intentions over bellicose actions

The film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, or Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant, has drawn huge audiences. Following national box-office earnings surpassing 2 billion yuan ($298 million), it was released in Hong Kong cinemas on Sept 11, a month behind the Chinese mainland.

On screen, Xu Fu, a chef from northeast China, travels to a war-torn region of the Middle East and runs the Dragon Restaurant amid the shelling. With one hot meal after another, he creates a small haven where people caught in the crossfire can breathe, even if only for a moment. Beyond the screen, a much larger story is unfolding: On one side stand the ruins left by the United States’ war; on the other, a picture of reconstruction in which China is playing a role. In this sense, the film is like a prism, refracting two profoundly different paths a country can take in the world. While the movie is set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country during the early 2000s, I believe audiences have the intuition to associate it with real-world settings.

On March 20, 2003, the US invaded Iraq, citing its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, without authorization from the United Nations Security Council. The evidence used to justify the invasion was later discredited, and the alleged biological weapons were never found. The war, launched on a deeply flawed premise, brought devastating consequences to Iraq. According to research by Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Iraq War resulted in an estimated 550,000 deaths, including up to 250,000 civilians. Between 2003 and 2021, some 9.2 million Iraqis became refugees or were displaced from their homes. More than 1.1 million people remain displaced today. Hundreds of tons of depleted-uranium munitions were used by US forces and their allies in Iraq. The war did not merely destroy lives. It shattered the foundations of an entire country.

The US toppled Saddam Hussein’s government but failed to establish a stable new order. Sectarian violence erupted, while the Islamic State exploited the chaos to increase its power. A country that had not previously been associated with terrorism became a new breeding ground for extremist violence. Washington had expected a swift “victory”, but instead became bogged down in a prolonged insurgency for eight years, eventually withdrawing while Iraq remained deeply unstable. A lie opened the door to war. War created ruins. Ruins bred resentment. Resentment fueled new extremism. Such was the vicious cycle left behind by the Iraq War.

China, by contrast, has followed a fundamentally different path. While the US once sought to reshape Iraq with bombs, Chinese companies have become involved in its reconstruction with concrete, steel and school classrooms, as depicted in the movie.  

The storyline is not entirely fictional. Director Wen Muye drew inspiration from the real experiences of a group of Chinese people who opened restaurants in Iraq amid the turmoil of the early 2000s. After the Iraq War began in 2003, a Chinese man named Liu Lei traveled to Baghdad with just $3,700, hoping to find business opportunities. He later invited his colleague Shuai Xuejun to become his partner, and together they opened a restaurant called China Dragon in Baghdad’s green zone.

Shuai traveled from Jordan to Baghdad by hired car, traveling along what was known as the “Road of Death”. At one point, a bomb exploded just a few hundred meters ahead of them, sending a cloud of dust into the sky. When he finally arrived, the walls of the room on the second floor of the restaurant were riddled with bullet holes. “I could lie inside the room and see the blue sky through those bullet holes,” he recalled.

Why would ordinary Chinese people take such enormous risks to travel to a war zone? Not to conquer. Not to expand. Simply to make a living. To put food on the table and support their families. Yet it was precisely these ordinary people, driven by nothing more than the need to make a living, who created something extraordinary amid the flames of war. As one line in the film puts it: “There is only peace and good food at the Dragon Restaurant”.

Quite apart from hot meals, in 2021, China and Iraq signed a cooperation agreement under which China would help Iraq build 1,000 model schools. PowerChina is responsible for constructing 679 of them across 10 provinces. These schools have already benefited more than 500,000 Iraqi primary and secondary students. Many Iraqis have come to affectionately call them “Chinese schools”.

Other Chinese companies are also deeply involved in Iraq’s energy sector. Suzhou Sinoma, for example, built the Delta Cement Plant in Sulaymaniyah, with two production lines capable of producing 5,300 and 6,000 tons of cement clinker a day respectively. To help address Iraq’s chronic power shortages, the project also includes a 15-megawatt waste-heat power generation facility and a 50-megawatt photovoltaic power plant, with the solar facility generating around 84 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. Shanghai Electric has launched combined-cycle expansion projects across four Iraqi provinces, with a total capacity of 625 megawatts.

These projects share a common feature: They do not export an ideology or come with political conditions attached. They address tangible needs in people’s daily lives. As a representative of a local cement plant put it, the value of Chinese involvement lies not only in equipment and technology, but also in giving new momentum to the modernization of Iraq’s building-materials industry and the diversification of its economy.

This is a philosophy of teaching people how to fish rather than simply giving them fish. It is to empower Iraqis to master the skills they need to build their own country, leaving behind a professional local workforce that cannot simply be taken away, that is genuinely useful, and that can be relied upon.

Place the story of the Dragon Restaurant alongside the reality of Iraq today, and a striking contrast emerges. The US brought the roar of F-16 fighter jets and the legacy of depleted-uranium munitions; it left behind hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced people. Under the banner of “democratic transformation”, it helped turn a relatively stable country into fertile ground for terrorism. Two decades later, what has the US achieved?

The US has traditionally embraced an interventionist approach: Overthrow governments it dislikes, reshape countries that refuse to follow its lead, even when the price is hundreds of thousands of lives and the collapse of an entire state. Although the movie is based on stories from two decades ago, it is sadly still highly relevant as an anti-war drama, given the ongoing conflict in Iran.

China, by contrast, emphasizes peaceful coexistence and mutual development: noninterference in other countries’ internal affairs, respect for their right to choose their own development paths, and cooperation over confrontation, construction over destruction. Mirroring the reality, in Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, what is being welcomed is peace. It demonstrates the possibility that people of different ethnicities and faiths can sit around the same table peacefully and simply share a meal. The movie can almost be viewed as a thought-provoking documentary.

The author is a member of the Legislative Council and the UN Association of China.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.