<p>This article examines how African students in China negotiate the ‘home–host country’ power asymmetry reified in daily interactions through performing ‘alterity.’ While studies of international students’ identities are of great scholarly interest, there is little work that explicitly places these dynamic negotiations within the framework of global geographies of power. Drawing on a 15-month ethnographic study, this article shows how a group of African students strategically position and perform how they are different from the Chinese while studying at a Chinese university. The findings reveal that the students’ interactions with the Chinese community (e.g. local residents/students) heightened their awareness of being positioned as economically/culturally disadvantaged against the wider global geographies of power in which many African students and their countries of origin are embedded. Yet, they actively engage in identity negotiation by essentialising their post-colonial identity, continental African identity, and national identity to resist marginalisation and, more importantly, to seek recognition and respect from the host country/university. This study offers critical insights into how international students’ identity negotiation is deeply shaped by the asymmetrical power dynamics between home and host country, as well as their awareness of and responses to these unequal power relations. It also contributes to the new emerging paradigm of ‘student self-formation’ in higher education studies by illustrating how students’ agentive subjectivity is implicated in the process of ‘alterity’ performance.</p>