The hookah is an ancient invention that predates the arrival of tobacco in the Old World, and as such, was quite possibly invented for use with cannabis and/or opium originally. China has been actively trading with the peoples of Central, Western, and Southern Asia since the hookah's invention, and doubtless had a steady stream of visitors along the Silk Road for centuries who were hookah smokers. So I have a hard time imagining that this invention was never brought to China before the modern era, especially seeing how addictive tobacco is, to say nothing of opium.
Moreover, China has a similar tea-drinking social culture as the Arab world, Persia, and India, which. All of these tea-drinking social settings, including China's, readily adopted tobacco smoking as soon as Europeans introduced tobacco to the Old World. In China this mostly takes the form of cigarettes, but in southern China I frequently saw people smoking water pipes made of bamboo. So the idea of using a water pipe to cool and concentrate tobacco smoke was not unknown to the Chinese.
It seems to me that the hookah should have long ago found a place in Chinese culture, and been fairly popular there at certain times and places. But this never happened, as far as I know. What historical factors might have hindered the spread of the hookah this far east?
I'm not a historian of China or East Asia, and can't comment on the specific issue of the Chinese adoption (or lack thereof) of the water pipe; but your question does make a number of presuppositions about consumption culture further west, and I'd like to address those. Specifically, the question assumes that both tea-drinking and water pipe usage are far more historically-rooted traditions in the Arab and Persian worlds than they really are. (I'm more qualified to discuss the Persian case, so that's what my comments will largely address specifically.) While I can't answer your main question, then, I hope that this response will help you reconsider some of the priors underlying your confusion.
Moreover, China has a similar tea-drinking social culture as the Arab world, Persia, and India, which. All of these tea-drinking social settings, including China's, readily adopted tobacco smoking as soon as Europeans introduced tobacco to the Old World. In China this mostly takes the form of cigarettes, but in southern China I frequently saw people smoking water pipes made of bamboo. So the idea of using a water pipe to cool and concentrate tobacco smoke was not unknown to the Chinese.
It is true that Persian elites probably came into contact with tea by the time of the Mongol Empire, if not earlier. The first recorded mention of tea in a European source actually comes from an Italian compilation of travel narratives, and specifically the narrative of the Persian merchant "Chaggi Mehmet" [Hajji Mohammad] of Gilan. But as a social beverage, tea came relatively late into Persian circles; for much of the early Safavid period, the caffeinated beverage of choice was coffee (and before that, I'm not sure caffeine was consumed in large quantities, at least through drinks). It was only in the nineteenth century that tea began to replace coffee as a commonly consumed good, and that—as argued by Rudi Matthee, who's studied the question most thoroughly—was due as much to tea's popularity among the British and Russians (both of whom wielded a lot of influence in Persia at the time) as it was to domestic factors like class or status.
The hookah is an ancient invention that predates the arrival of tobacco in the Old World, and as such, was quite possibly invented for use with cannabis and/or opium originally.
While the water pipe may be quite a bit older than the arrival of tobacco in the Old World, "ancient" is a bit of a stretch. Common academic belief has it that the water pipe originated in Persia (when is a bit unclear), and that by the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries some sort of water pipe may have been used to smoke hashish in Ethiopia. Other details of its use and transmission before the early modern period remain rather obscure, though Mathee argues pretty convincingly for an Indo-Muslim origin—and thus transmission through the Indian Ocean rather than over land—instead.
But my point is that the water pipe was probably a medieval invention at the earliest, and so it couldn't have diffused to China through the Silk Road (before the routes were disrupted by the breakup of the Mongol Empire).
SOURCES:
The main study of this sort of thing would be Rudi Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900 (Princeton University Press, 2005), which contains a short section on the water pipe (pp. 124-127) and an important chapter on the switch from coffee to tea consumption (pp. 237-266).
For a more in-depth look at the tea trade and consumption in early nineteenth century Iran, see Willem Floor, "Tea Consumption and Imports Into Qajar Iran," Studia Iranica 33 (2004): 47-111; for a broader, older, and generally less satisfactory overview, the article "ČĀY" in Encyclopedia Iranica (online).
On the water pipe, and smoking more generally, see also Willem Floor, "The Art of Smoking in Iran and Other Uses of Tobacco," Iranian Studies 35, no. 1/3 (2002): 47-85. www.jstor.org/stable/4311437. (Floor's arguments on the origins of the water pipe are, however, in the Iranian-origin vein that Matthee's work largely supersedes, so take them with a grain of salt.)