Students’ imaginative geographies and the geopolitics of knowledge: perceptions and positionings of a Chinese international branch campus in Malaysia

China’s expanding overseas provision of transnational higher education has become increasingly significant yet remains underexplored. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations at a Chinese international branch campus (IBC) in Malaysia, this article examines how differently positioned student groups perceive and locate the IBC within shifting knowledge hierarchies. Malaysian Chinese students rework inherited imaginaries into regional re-routing, evaluating the IBC through a locally embedded, China-referenced hierarchy of educational legitimacy rather than global ranking systems. Mainland Chinese students re-domesticate the campus as an external node of China’s domestic higher-education system, evaluating it through nationally familiar markers of institutional recognition rather than through its overseas location. Other local and international students imagine it as a gateway to Chinese and regional futures, with varying forms of aspiration, proximity and strategic engagement unevenly shaped by national contexts, linguistic considerations and labour-market horizons. By bringing the geopolitics of knowledge into dialogue with students’ imaginative geographies, this article examines how hierarchies of higher-education legitimacy and recognition work as historical conditions and spatial orderings that are lived, negotiated and partially reworked through students’ situated meaning-making. In doing so, it advances understanding of China’s overseas expansion of transnational higher education by foregrounding student heterogeneity and agency, while also shedding light on how IBCs operate as non-state sites through which the geopolitics of knowledge is enacted and selectively renegotiated from below within South-South and postcolonial contexts.