China has become one of Iraq’s most important economic partners. It buys Iraq’s oil, helps build its infrastructure, and sells heaps of electronics and other consumer goods to its citizens.
But that commercial dominance hasn’t yet extended to entertainment, a field where America and other Western countries still dominate.
“Chinese media and cultural production have very little influence on Iraqi society compared with Western media, Hollywood films and American entertainment more broadly,” says Iraqi community activist Mazen Al-Haidari.
The same could be said for much of the Middle East, where China’s cultural output has yet to make a big impression.
Beijing hopes that a new film will help change that dynamic. “Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant,” which was a hit in China this summer, trades commerce for culture and tries to draw a distinction between Chinese and American approaches to the world.
The film, whose English title is “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East,” is set in the fictional capital of Bahata, but it’s clear that the city is a stand-in for Baghdad after the U.S. invasion. The film’s upcoming global release comes as the U.S. finds itself in another conflict in the region, this time with Iran, another country with deep economic ties to China.
“I think China is trying to reassure the world that they are not the aggressor, they are not starting wars, they are trying to avoid conflicts, yet they find themselves often in the middle of conflicts,” said Michael Berry, the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The movie’s hero is Xu Fu, a cook and businessman who runs a restaurant in an area modeled after Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” where American troops are based and American money flows freely.
Xu is the personification of the business-forward brand of diplomacy China seeks to project. His restaurant becomes a refuge from the conflict. Food stands in for “happiness and peace,” director Wen Muye told Global Times, a Chinese tabloid.
“We place more weight on humanism and the value of a person’s existence,” Wen said.
The U.S. is cast as the invader, but American soldiers aren’t just villains. “Instead they appear as ordinary young men, loose in discipline and marked by the alienation of war,” the Global Times, which is published by the Chinese Communist Party, wrote.
In the real world, Iraq offers a good case study of China’s brand of diplomacy. Beijing has built deep economic ties in the country.
According to the Great Powers Index, an MBN project released this week, Iraq is more closely aligned with Beijing than Washington by several metrics, with commercial ties playing an especially important role.
Iraq exports more oil to China than to any other nation. Chinese energy companies are deeply involved in the extraction of the crude too. Their workers, like Xu Fu, operate as envoys to the country.
Iraq is also one of the main recipients of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. According to data from the Index, China has built or announced plans to build $4.5 billion in construction projects in Iraq, the second largest total in MENA behind Saudi Arabia.
And China accounts for almost one-third of Iraq’s total imports, driven in part by consumer electronics for the country’s increasingly urban population.
China has made similar connections across MENA, as the Index shows. But Beijing’s unwillingness to step more deeply into the region’s politics has reportedly frustrated leaders there who want it to do more to end the current crisis.
The film itself implies that China’s extensive commercial ties make it difficult to set itself above political conflicts. “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 Xu at one point in the film.
Xu is a fictional character. But his story offers another way for China to sell itself to Iraq and its neighbors. Whether that signals a more direct diplomatic role in the region is less clear.
