Buffered and burdened agency: African students navigating Chinese higher education

China has become a major destination for African students, yet their experiences are still often framed through deficit, aid, or soft power narratives that obscure their agency. This qualitative study examines how African international students in Chinese higher education institutions exercise agency under constraint. Drawing on 16 in‐depth interviews with students from seven African countries, we used reflexive thematic analysis to explore how participants navigated academic, social, and institutional challenges. Three interlinked domains emerged: the work of learning (intensive study and language demands within opaque academic governance), belonging under negotiation (coexisting hospitality, distance, and everyday racialisation), and structures under scrutiny (scholarships, work/visa rules, pricing practices, and service visibility). Across these domains, students were not passive recipients of China–Africa ‘cooperation’ but situated actors whose efforts were patterned by China's semi‐peripheral, rule‐dense higher education ecology. Conceptually, this paper develops an agency‐under‐constraint lens that distinguishes between buffered agency—when clear rules, supportive staff, and peer networks share the load—and burdened agency, when students must compensate for institutional gaps through intensified effort. We also introduce reframing agency to capture the interpretive and affective work through which students reframe exclusionary encounters to preserve dignity and possibility, showing that this labour can itself be either buffered by peer support and broader acceptance or burdened when students must carry it largely alone. The findings extend debates on international student mobility and well‐being by showing how agency and support are co‐constitutive, and by arguing that what appears as student resilience is often shaped by whether institutions share or shift the load of action. More legible, relationally attentive governance is therefore central to more equitable China–Africa higher education partnerships.