A Chinese-made new blockbuster movie, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, has quickly been placed by some commentators within the familiar frame of “Wolf Warrior cinema”, “nationalist export” and “overseas ideological projection”. Such readings reveal less about the film than about the interpretive anxiety that now greets almost any Chinese cinematic narrative in which Chinese characters appear abroad showing dignity, competence, and moral agency. A commercial film about a Chinese cook caught up in a Middle Eastern war zone is thus made to bear the burden of geopolitics.
The film’s premise is clear: A Chinese chef arrives in a foreign country to work in a restaurant. Because of the onset of war, the restaurant becomes a shelter, the cook becomes a reluctant protector, and the ordinary question of what to eat becomes inseparable from the harsher question of who is allowed to live.
To call this “Wolf Warrior cinema” is an act of critical overreach. The film does not center on military triumph, national revenge, or heroic domination. Its protagonist is not a soldier who defeats foreign enemies. He is a frightened civilian trying to keep vulnerable people alive with limited means. His tools are not missiles, intelligence networks, or diplomatic privileges, but food, patience, humor, negotiation, and human decency. More significantly, no Chinese national flag appears throughout the entire film. Such absence matters because it weakens the claim that the film operates through overt national symbolism. If such a character is regarded as ideologically threatening merely because he is Chinese and refuses to collapse into helplessness, the problem lies less in the film’s content than in the critic’s presumption that Chinese virtue abroad must always be suspect.
The real discomfort appears to arise from the film’s treatment of the Iraq War (2003-11) background. For decades, Western institutions have shaped the dominant cinematic and journalistic language around that war. Hollywood has often portrayed the trauma of American soldiers, the confusion of command, and the moral injury of combat. Yet these works frequently preserve, even in criticism, the deeper assumption that Western intervention is the central moral drama, and that local civilians’ suffering functions mainly as scenery for Western self-examination. Once Upon a Time in the Middle East shifts that viewpoint. It asks what the war looks like from the kitchen, the street, the refugee waiting line, the parent who cannot find medicine, and the child who learns that the sky itself may become lethal.
That shift in perspective is not propaganda. It is a legitimate change of forum. In legal terms, one might say the film contests the standing narrative. Who has the right to describe the consequences of a war? Must the right belong only to the states that launched it, the media systems that justified it, and the cultural industries that later converted remorse into prestige? A Chinese film is fully entitled to depict the human cost of a conflict that reshaped global politics and harmed civilians immensely.
The charge of “overseas ideological projection” is even more absurd. Every cinema carries assumptions about dignity, community, danger, and home. American films have long presented Americans rescuing strangers, correcting foreign chaos, and standing as moral referees of distant societies. These stories are rarely dismissed as “ideological exports”. By contrast, when a Chinese film allows a Chinese civilian to save others, certain commentators rush to diagnose political intention. The asymmetry is obvious. Western confidence is read as universality; Chinese confidence is treated as aggression.
This double standard is especially visible in the discussion of food. The film’s repeated attention to Chinese cooking is not flag-waving. Food in the film is a language of order amid ruin. When locals gather around Chinese dishes, the scene does not declare cultural conquest. It suggests that civilization survives through small acts of care before it survives through official slogans. In a devastated city, a hot meal becomes a modest moral judgment against barbarism: These people are still human, still hungry, still entitled to tenderness.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East should be debated as a film, with attention to its genre balance, emotional rhythm, character writing, political imagination, and commercial craft. It should not be reduced to a label designed to disqualify it from serious consideration
The framing of Once Upon a Time in the Middle East as “overseas ideological projection” also reflects broader unease in some commentary circles. The language often conceals a hierarchy of recognition. For them, Chinese cultural confidence is acceptable when it is folkloric, nostalgic, or commercially decorative. It becomes troubling when it carries moral judgment. A film about Chinese family roots, like Dear You, may be suspected of emotional mobilization. A film about Chinese civilians abroad may be suspected of “nationalist export”. Such narratives create a narrow cage for Chinese storytelling: Be sentimental, but not assertive; be exotic, but not morally serious; be global, but do not challenge the authorized Western account of global affairs.
What makes such narratives so revealing is that the film’s patriotism, if one insists on using that word, is quiet rather than coercive. It does not require grand speeches, raised banners, or visual ceremonies of allegiance. It emerges from contrast. Viewers see war, disorder, humiliation, hunger, fear, and the fragility of ordinary life. They then understand, without instruction, why peace matters and why national stability is not an empty phrase. A society that can protect normal meals, safe streets, family reunions, and the safe return of its citizens has achieved something that should not be treated with suspicion or sneer. Gratitude for such conditions is not extremism. It is moral proportion.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East should be debated as a film, with attention to its genre balance, emotional rhythm, character writing, political imagination, and commercial craft. It should not be reduced to a label designed to disqualify it from serious consideration. The reflex that brands any upright Chinese presence overseas as “Wolf Warrior” has become intellectually lazy and politically revealing.
The author is a solicitor, a Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area lawyer, and a China-appointed attesting officer.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
