This paper unveils the previously seldom-known commercial connections between China and Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is often assumed that during this high time of western imperial expansion, these two non-western societies had little interactions with each other due to their predicaments from within and without. However, records show that China exported tea, silk, and soybeans while importing cotton, cigarettes, and cigars from Egypt. Merchants handling the transfer of these products and consumers enjoying their consumptions were the dynamic forces behind these commercial ties. On the supply side, Chinese and Egyptian merchants had frequent contacts in Southeast Asia and India where their products were first exported to and then relayed to their respective final destinations. The locales of Chinese-Egyptian interactions were not limited to China and Egypt. Spaces of other cultures also mediated their encounters. The shipping of commodities, however, was often carried out by the British vessels. Chinese and Arab apparatus of trade were under the British control as well. On the consumption side of the story, the needs of exchanging foreign products also reveal the material cultures of China and Egypt. Whereas Chinese soybeans were used as a substitute for more expensive protein sources such as meat, Egyptian cotton met the demands of many Chinese textile factories. Egyptian cigarette and cigars were exotic luxuries for Chinese urban elites. So was Chinese tea and silk for the Egyptian upper class. As a result, Chinese and Egyptians from different places in the socioeconomic spectrum—from elites to commoners, and from rich merchants to poor factory workers—all had at least some exposure to the idea of each other, even if many of them never had a chance to directly interact with each other. Although in their minds they might have very different imaginations about what China or Egypt was like, they were bounded by tightly knit transnational trade networks, mediating spaces and powers, and invisible flows of material cultures.

From 1938 to 1947, a Chinese Muslim scholar named Muhammad Tawāḍuʿ Pang—known in China as Pang Shiqian—lived and studied at al-Azhar as part of a set of interwar Chinese Muslim missions to Egypt. While in Cairo, Tawāḍuʿ Pang produced his Arabic-language magnum opus, China and Islam, published by the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Islamic World Outreach Division” in May 1945. This book was perhaps the most remarkable work in a bilingual corpus of Islamic thought produced by the prolific “Chinese Azharites.” My essay maps Tawāḍuʿ Pang’s understanding and application of Islamic reformist concepts—part of a larger Chinese Muslim attempt to stake their claim within the broader Islamic world and simultaneously to make China and the world safe for Islam. At a time of acute geopolitical and existential crisis brought by the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, China’s war with Japan, and the rapid rise of secular ideologies and institutions in both Asia and the Middle East, the Egypt missions provided an opportunity to “re-Orient” Chinese Islam on a more auspicious path. I argue that during this period, Islamic reformist thought articulated in the Arab Middle East formed the crucial center of gravity on which Chinese Muslims pinned their hopes for greater self-understanding and sound sociopolitical progress. Utilizing little-known Arabic and Chinese sources and building on diverse fields including Chinese, Middle Eastern, Islamic, and global history, this essay seeks to decouple Chinese Muslim history from prior narratives of marginalization, and to decouple histories of China and the Middle East from teleologies of modernization and the fraught encounter between “West” and “non-West.” In reading and contextualizing this critical portion of the Chinese Azharite corpus, this essay also reconstructs a brief moment of possibility in which transnationalist forms of allegiance held equal if not greater sway to nationalist ones in Chinese Muslim consciousness, and in which the pursuit of modernization and progress need not entail a rejection of faith or the abandonment of a much-celebrated past.

The meeting of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Zhou Enlai at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, triggered three years of rapid development of ties between the People’s Republic of China and Egypt. Nasser’s decision in May 1956 to establish formal diplomatic relations with Beijing made Egypt the first Arab country and the first African country to recognize China’s Communist regime. Later that year, China’s outspoken backing of Nasser throughout the Suez Crisis further strengthened the special bond that was forming between the two countries. Yet as Chinese and Egyptian officials met again and again to proclaim their mutual admiration and unwavering support, these diplomatic efforts masked the fact that the most significant consequences of Sino-Egyptian relations were their ramifications within Chinese and Egyptian domestic politics. Both Mao Zedong’s and Nasser’s governments were young regimes still in the process of consolidating power and articulating a coherent guiding national ideology. The development of Sino-Egyptian relations afforded them an opportunity to refine the self-image they presented to their own constituents. As more and more scholars begin to pay attention to the history of China’s ties to Egypt, they should not overlook the profound ideological significance of this relationship as it was manifested within both societies. This paper analyzes the effects of developing relations between China and Egypt in the mid-to-late 1950s on two particular groups that had an inherent connection to both sides: Chinese Muslims and Egyptian leftists. Using primary sources in both Chinese and Arabic, as well as research in Chinese archives at both the national and local level, it demonstrates how the prevailing discourses about China and Egypt reinforced the nationalist credentials of Mao’s and Nasser’s governments. The government-run China Islamic Association and the central government in Beijing promoted Egypt, particularly during mass demonstrations at the height of the Suez Crisis, in a manner that reaffirmed Chinese nationalism and the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In Egypt, leftist commentators embraced the CCP in order to endorse the idea of “revolution” at a time when Nasser was beginning to articulate an ideological basis for his rule that also emphasized his revolutionary leadership. The similar experiences of China and Egypt as anti-imperialist countries allowed intellectuals and policymakers in both countries to present the other as a mirror in which to reflect their own societies.

This paper examines the political-economic dynamism of China’s cross-strait competition between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC) in the Arab world in the late twentieth century, with particular focus on the Saudi-ROC relationship. For many Arab states, especially for those pro-US monarchical states, “China” had meant ROC up to some points in that century. The substantial Arab-ROC diplomatic relations dates back to 1937, when ROC in the war against Japan formed the Chinese Muslim Salvation Association and dispatched the Muslim delegation to Arab states in order to rally political support among Arab Muslims. Leveraging this “hajj diplomacy”, ROC entered semi-official relationship with Saudi Arabia, which became upgraded to a formal diplomatic tie after WWII. Since then, ROC and Saudi Arabia had maintained 44-year formal relationship until 1990 when it became the last Arab state to switch recognition to PRC. The Saudi-ROC tie was primarily based on the Cold War politics as the two states, in firm alliance with the US, shared common political stance against Communism. However, the ROC government had never been at ease only with this common ideational factor. PRC’s growing influence in the Arab socialist states especially after the Bandung Conference (1955) was alarming, and even in Saudi Arabia, PRC began establishing its foothold with “hajj diplomacy” in its hand now. In order to counter PRC’s infiltration into the kingdom, ROC launched what can be called “techno-diplomacy” in the early 1960s as a part of its global anti-PRC campaign. Leveraging its relatively advanced technological standard, ROC made use of technology transfer to Saudi Arabia for reinforcing the political alliance. This strategy was proven effective particularly after the kingdom entered the period of developmentalism with the inception of its five-year development plan in 1970, and it prolonged the formal tie for another 19 years after most of the Arab states switched recognition to PRC in 1971 with the ostracism of ROC from the UNSC. The Saudi-ROC relationship was not only anomalistic but, in fact, reached its heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s as ROC’s techno-diplomacy, constantly upgraded along its own economic growth, won the heart and mind of the modernisation-oriented Saudi leadership. ROC’s techno-diplomacy, nevertheless, declined in the 1980s when the top political agenda in the kingdom became security, ceding the position of “China” to PRC.