This article explores the Nahdawi enthusiasm for the Chinese constitutional revolution through a close reading of three texts: John Otway Percy Bland’s book Recent Events and Present Policies in China (1912), Lord Cromer’s “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia” (1913) and its anonymous Arabic translation “Lord Cromer on China” (1913). Tracing the genealogy of these texts, I compare Cromer’s English original and its Arabic translation, contextualized within the genre of colonial political theory. I argue that the anonymous Nahdawi translator draws upon Lord Cromer’s authority in translating his text in journal article form, but subverts the rhetorical devices European colonizers used to justify colonial rule and uses the signs and symbols of imperial sovereignty to promote constitutionalism in Egypt instead. By leveraging the racist portrayal of the east in European political theory, the Arabic translator uses negative portrayals of China and the far east in order to advocate for political reform in Egypt. Egypt’s position, straddling east and west, allowed Nahdawi intellectuals to use western racism as the shadow of a threat haunting their society if certain reforms were not enacted, establishing a concept of Egyptian society as struggling to position itself on a political spectrum between China and Europe. This sense that Egypt represented an oblique point somewhere between China and Europe demonstrates the way a triangular framework of international relations structured Egypt’s self-identification.