For one thing, it depicts the American invasion of 2003 from an unfamiliar vantage: not the green-tinged light show beamed into Western homes, but the shriek and crash of bombs slamming into a slumbering city, shocking and awful. The plot is outlandish, many characters cartoonish. Yet people outside China should still watch it.
“WELCOME TO Dragon Restaurant”, a new Chinese box-office hit set in a thinly disguised Iraq, will not win any Oscars.
One real-life inspiration for the film was Liu Lei, who quit his tech job and moved to Baghdad in 2003 to open a restaurant. He moves to a fictionalised Baghdad in the hope of making more money from his cooking. Western soldiers and, ahem, journalists like his food and love his booze. He rakes it in, until a suicide-bomber strikes. His former business partner is implicated, so Xu spends time in an American jail. Later, Islamic militants capture him. Chinese state media and intellectuals have heralded the film as a parable of what China offers a world wrecked by America. Yet there is more to the film, not all of it flattering to China. A central conceit is that China wants to be liked by everyone. Xu Fu is a paragon for any good, nimble Chinese diplomat. His local partner is an official in the pre-war regime; Xu stays loyal to him even after he loses power. American soldiers also grow fond of him and, especially, his cooking. So does the terrorist mastermind who seizes him. Through it all, Xu sees their common humanity. The film, to its credit, is not blind to the tensions. “Your partner was the perpetrator. Your friend was the victim. You really think you’ve got nothing to do with this war?” an American soldier asks him. That might prompt self-reflection in Chinese officials who protest neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war and are peeved when Westerners point out that China’s supplies and cash keep the Russian forces going. You really think you’ve got nothing to do with this war? Another characteristic of dragon-restaurant diplomacy is its thinness. Later in the film, Xu is imbued with humanitarian aims, working to save orphans. Yet he is a reluctant saviour. At one point a friend tells him: “You should have stayed out of it. These are not your children. In the end, he takes this counsel, returning to China and leaving it all behind. Not much to disagree with there. But it speaks to the limits of Chinese support for partners abroad. China is wary of entanglements, especially of the military variety. Iran and Venezuela learned that this year. “China is not interested in being a security guarantor. Yet China risks being seduced by its own cooking. She worked as a waitress in his restaurant and every afternoon collected leftovers to bring to an orphanage. That plotline would have struggled to get past a Chinese censor. In trying to be friends to all, China makes one glaring exception: Japan. Xi Jinping accuses the country of reviving its militarism. He cannot accept that Japan might want peace as much as China professes to. In dragon-restaurant diplomacy, China decides which truths to serve.
The hero of the film (which in English is officially called “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East”) is Xu Fu. When war starts, he discovers the lucrative “green zone” that houses the American forces. The film’s anti-war message, in Xu’s words, is to “eat well and raise your children well”. “It is a matter of managing expectations,” says Karim Alwadi, an expert in Sino-Arab relations. In his co-authored memoir, “Making Money at Death’s Feet”, it was a young Japanese anti-war campaigner, not Mr Liu, who was the real humanitarian.
