"'Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it.' -Chinese Proverb," Ivanka posted on Monday, the night before her father and Kim came together to seek an end to a tense decades-old nuclear stand-off.
China's internet quickly lit up puzzled rather than flattered by the reference.
"Our editor really can't think of exactly which proverb this is. Please help!" the news channel for Sina -- the company behind Weibo, China's largest Twitter-like platform -- wrote on its official social media account.
In thousands of comments on Weibo, users proffered scores of different suggestions without arriving at a consensus.
Some suggested the proverb "the foolish old man removed mountains" -- a common phrase used to signify perseverance. It refers to a fable about a man who persisted in his attempt to level a mountain he found inconvenient by dogged digging.
Ivanka Trump's family has a lot of fans in China. Her six-year-old daughter, Arabella Kushner, became an online sensation by singing ballads in Mandarin and reciting Chinese poetry in a video that was shown to President Xi Jinping during Donald Trump's visit to Beijing last year.
"She saw it in a fortune cookie at Panda Express," one user wrote.
Another said: "It makes sense, but I still don't know which proverb it is."
"One proverb from Ivanka has exhausted the brain cells of all Chinese internet users," a commenter admitted.
Bill Kristol, editor of the US political magazine the Weekly Standard, tweeted a guess that the phrase "seems in fact to be American from the turn of the 20th c.- which makes sense, since its spirit is can-do Americanism".
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"But why are Trump WH (White House) aides giving our proverbs to China, increasing our proverb deficit?" he quipped
