Editor's note: Xu Ying is a Beijing-based international affairs commentator for CGTN. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

After its theatrical release, the Chinese film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East quickly became a box-office phenomenon, grossing more than 200 million yuan ($29.66 million) on its opening day and attracting more than 5.7 million moviegoers. On the surface, the film tells the story of a Chinese chef who opens a restaurant in the Middle East. Beneath that premise, however, it confronts a far more consequential question: When some countries habitually turn to military force to settle political disputes and use bombs to reorder the destinies of other nations, what does peace actually mean?

Set against the wars that convulsed the Middle East in the early 21st century, the film follows Xu Fu, a Chinese chef who travels abroad to repay his debts and, together with Ma Junsheng, runs a Chinese restaurant. Their ambitions are modest: make money, pay off their debts and get on with their lives. But when war suddenly arrives, they are swept into a catastrophe far beyond the reach of any individual to control.

Unlike a conventional Hollywood war blockbuster, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East does not turn Xu Fu into an invincible hero, nor does it put a weapon in his hands and ask him to alter the course of history. His defining identity remains that of a cook. Amid shelling and fear, his most important task is simply to make sure that people can still sit down to a hot meal.

That is precisely where the film derives much of its power. It does not explain peace through grand slogans. Instead, it approaches the question through one of the most familiar and intimate experiences in Chinese life: eating. And from that ordinary act, it asks why peace matters in the first place.

From 'winning the war' to 'keeping life intact'

For decades, Hollywood has exerted an extraordinary influence over the world's visual imagination of war and its emotional grammar. Generals strategize, soldiers charge into battle, terrorists remain shadowy figures, refugees wait to be rescued and reconciliation ultimately depends on the awakening or sacrifice of an exceptional individual.

The formula has become so familiar that war films from elsewhere have often found themselves either imitating it and losing their own voice, or resisting it while remaining trapped in its shadow. The conventional war movie enters history through the battlefield. Generals, soldiers, weapons, strategy and victory become the organizing principles of the narrative.

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East takes another route. It makes a restaurant its window onto war. There is no war room here, no command center, no vast strategic map. Instead, there are stoves, ladles, account books, ingredients and a group of people waiting for dinner. War is not explained through military briefings. It enters the viewer's consciousness through power cuts, food shortages, soaring prices, flight, disappearance and the hungry eyes of children.

The restaurant kitchen becomes a counterpoint to the violence outside. Ingredients are tossed in a wok while smoke rolls through the streets. In the kitchen, the chef worries about heat; on the battlefield, commanders calculate firepower. The cook tries to preserve the flavor of every dish, while war strips ordinary life of its most basic order. The more tangible the aroma of food becomes, the more absurd and brutal the surrounding violence appears.

The film moves the camera slightly away from the center of the battlefield. It does not ask us to watch the general; it asks us to watch the cook. It does not ask who won the war; it asks whether dinner can still be served.

That choice is itself a struggle over narrative power. It represents an increasingly conscious attempt by Chinese cinema to establish its own vocabulary on the global cultural stage. Rather than simply telling a "Chinese story" within frameworks long defined elsewhere, the film seeks to use a distinctly Chinese moral and cultural compass to reconsider what a war story can be.

The director of the film, Wen Muye, does not burden his protagonist with a mission to save the world. Xu Fu's first instincts are much more mundane: survive, keep the restaurant open and make enough money to repay what he owes. It is precisely this refusal to begin as a hero that separates the film from the Hollywood tradition of individual heroism.

The underlying logic of the Hollywood war movie is often that great individuals change history through great deeds. Once Upon a Time in the Middle East offers a more modest proposition, perhaps more deeply rooted in an Eastern civilizational sensibility: History may be too vast to repair from a kitchen, but a kitchen can still protect a small patch of humanity from being crushed by history.

The film's most powerful image is therefore not an explosion. It is a child once defined by war who ultimately holds a spoon rather than a gun. That is more than a visual motif. It is a declaration of narrative principle. Chinese cinema is refusing to reduce war to a theatrical confrontation between good and evil. Instead, it insists on looking at ordinary people who are pulverized beneath grand historical narratives. Its attention to the human being transcends nationality, race and ideology, reaching instead for the most elemental conditions of human existence.

Peace is more than the absence of war

The difference is not merely technical. It is civilizational. Hollywood's anti-war films often rely on speeches, sacrifice and moral judgment, with their emotional climax built around the completion of an individual's heroic journey. The Chinese approach to anti-war storytelling begins somewhere else with an old Chinese proverb: Food is people's top priority.

The film's deepest question is not the abstract proposition of whether people have a right to live. It is much more concrete: Can people still sit around a table and eat together? Can they still feed their children? Can they still make plans for tomorrow?

When a bomb falls, military terminology can describe its yield, range and precision. For the people beneath it, however, the consequences are brutally simple: no dinner, no home, no tomorrow. This narrative rooted in everyday experience is perhaps one of the dimensions most easily lost in the conventional grammar of Hollywood war cinema, and one that Chinese cinema can bring to the global conversation. It transforms peace from a political abstraction into a condition of everyday life. It turns opposition to war from a moral posture into a daily practice. That is a distinctly recognizable form of cultural expression.

For many Chinese people, peace is not an abstract diplomatic formula. It is understood through the routines of ordinary life. When parents tell their children to "eat well," they are expressing care. When family members ask, "When are you coming home?" they are asking whether someone is safe. People work, prepare for festivals, build houses and raise children because they believe tomorrow remains worth preparing for. That is why "eat well" in the film becomes more than a culinary instruction. It becomes a Chinese way of expressing love, and one of the most elemental refusals of war.

The film does not seek to overpower its opponents rhetorically, nor does it rush to place itself on some morally elevated platform. Its vision of peace is different from the logic of "violence against violence." That logic assumes that if an enemy can be eliminated, a target destroyed and a new political order imposed, the problem can be solved.

The film suggests otherwise. Force may change the flags flying above a street overnight, but it cannot automatically heal human trauma. It may destroy a city, but it cannot manufacture trust. It may overthrow a government, but it does not necessarily give ordinary people security or dignity.

The film does not deny the complexity of war, nor does it reduce different sides to simplistic caricatures of good and evil. It shows how different forces may act in the name of justice while the consequences are ultimately borne by people who had no say in the decision to go to war.

That gives the film's anti-war message a dimension beyond emotional condemnation. It reaches into the logic of war itself: When a small number of people can decide whether a much larger number of people will go to war, ordinary human lives risk being reduced to costs that can be calculated and sacrificed.

Food against firepower

Commentators have often noted the film's juxtaposition of "food and artillery." But this contrast is more than a matter of visual style. Food represents production, sharing and continuity while firepower represents destruction, possession and interruption. Cooking requires time, patience and the belief that someone will still return for the next meal. War, by contrast, demands rapid obedience, rapid judgment and the rapid destruction of an enemy.

The tension between the two is therefore a confrontation between two radically different logics of civilization.

The significance of Once Upon a Time in the Middle East extends well beyond the film itself. It suggests that Chinese cinema is beginning to develop its own international narrative grammar: not beginning with the abstractions of geopolitics, but with a spoon, ingredients and an iron wok; not placing a supposed "liberator" at the center of the story, but allowing a chef who merely wants to repay his debts to occupy that space; not delivering a predetermined ideological conclusion, but leaving the audience with a deceptively small question: Have you eaten?

Before peace becomes a treaty, a communique or a diplomatic declaration, it is first the simple fact that someone can cook, someone can eat and someone can put a child to bed without the sound of gunfire outside. This strategy of anchoring politics in ordinary life is both a complement to Hollywood's grand narratives and an enrichment of the global language of war cinema.

At a time when Hollywood still exerts enormous influence over what a war movie is supposed to look like, Chinese cinema has chosen to begin its story not with smoke and gunfire, but with the fire of a kitchen. That choice is itself a declaration of narrative sovereignty.

The film may not be perfect. But it demonstrates something important: There does not have to be only one way to tell stories about war and peace. And perhaps that is the most valuable starting point for Chinese cinema as it moves further onto the world stage – not to replace anyone else's voice, but to ensure that the world hears one more voice, and sees one more possibility.

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