This paper systematically takes up the under-studied topic of the status of “China” in modern Arabic thought in order to rethink the interrelations and limits of concepts such as nation and umma in the early twentieth century. The Arabic press began publishing articles on China, and Islam in China, in the late 1890s, in both secular nationalist and Islamic transnationalist modes. This paper divides this coverage into three periods. The first, coinciding with the last three decades of the Ottoman Empire, was characterized by a sense of mystery and unconquered distance, as well as consistent intermediation by Orientalist figures and their writings, visible in the writings of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Lebanese Christians, and Shakib Arslan. The second, coinciding with Ottoman and Qing collapse, the First World War, the Paris peace conference, and the 1919 Egyptian revolution, came to see China instead as a fellow nation-state attempting to remove the shackles of tradition and imperialism. The third, lasting for the 1930s and 1940s, consists of a forgotten episode in Egypt’s “crisis of orientation” and increasing gravitation toward an Islamo-Easternist mood. Islamic thinkers and activists such as Rashid Rida, Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, Ahmad Amin, and Hassan al-Banna all commented on current events in China, aspects of Chinese culture, and Islam in China. They also forged partnerships with the aspiring Chinese Muslim ulama studying at al-Azhar, who joined the conversation on China and its relationship to the destiny of the umma by contributing to al-Fath, al-Risala, and Muslim Brotherhood publications. This third phase, while bringing a long-sought direct dialogue not mediated by Orientalists, nevertheless coincided with forms of re-Orientalization: Arabic audiences were interested in China, for example, as a source of Confucianism and other “ancient Eastern philosophies.” Overall, a tension emerged throughout these writings as to whether China should be seen as connected to the Islamic umma by virtue of its large Muslim population, or as an Eastern nation-state to consider emulating (alongside Japan, India, or Turkey). At the same time, the Arabic press and al-Azhar fundamentally shaped the self-narratives of Muslims in modern China: the Chinese Azharites’ accounts of Islamic history and identity, inspired by al-Azhar’s Islamic modernism, eventually become naturalized as the virtually uncontested canonical truth of Chinese Islam to this day.