This paper seeks to understand the ways that intellectuals in China saw how the Arabic language mapped onto different communities of readers and writers in China from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s. Given the difficulties of learning and teaching Arabic within the Sino-Muslim community, translation would always be necessary for many or most readers who wanted to read religious texts such as the Qur’an. How, then, did intellectuals discuss commensurability between Arabic and Chinese, especially in light of the vernacular language movement that reached its height during the New Culture and May Fourth Movements (1915–1921)? Through readings of sources in both Chinese and Arabic (including texts in Arabic written by Sino-Muslims), I show how intellectuals in China—Muslim, Manchu, and Han Chinese—used Arabic as an alternative means to discuss the modernization of the Chinese language, a debate nearly always framed in terms of comparisons to the European Renaissance.