Script Romanization movements in China and the Arab world from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century are studied separately in different traditions. Whereas the former is considered part of the Chinese Revolution, the latter is examined in line with the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East. These two movements also ended differently. While nowadays pinyin, the official scheme for the Chinese phonetic alphabet is widely used to facilitate the learning of Mandarin in China and beyond, Romanization of Arabic is banned as a cultural taboo in the Arab world. These differences, however, occult a phenomenon attested in both movements: the ideologization of script to become proxy for the struggle against the peripheralization of the Chinese and the Arabs in the modern world-system. In both settings, polemics broke out around similar lines of arguments. Campaigners of Romanization blamed their original script for causing backwardness of their nation, acclaimed the Latin script as a key to democracy, progress, and modernity, and called for national salvation and renaissance via Romanization. Their logic was based on a parallel hierarchical evaluation of both the scripts and the nations. In contrast, opponents of Romanization saw their script as a symbol of national spirit, history, and identity, arguing that its replacement with the Latin script is equivalent to national demise. This paper traces this proxification of script in different phases of the Romanization movement in China, from qieyin Character to guoyu Romanization to Latinized new writing and then to pinyin, and in the Romanization movement in the Arab world, from the article published in the Beirut newspaper La Syrie in 1922 to the proposal ?Abd al-?Az?z Fahm? submitted to the Cairo Language Academy in 1944. The paper shows how language and script were networked into a similar structure of meaning in Chinese and Arab society, shaped out of the common experience of peripheralization in the modern world-system. It argues for a revaluation of China-Arab relations in line with this common experience to go beyond mere partnership of pragmatic and strategic needs.