<p>Elite higher education programmes worldwide increasingly attempt to reconcile academic excellence with broader social purposes. This study employs critical discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews with basic science undergraduates from two Double First-Class universities to examine how China’s “serving the nation” discourse links excellence with loyalty, and how this discourse generates tensions as it is translated into university practice. The findings reveal a paradoxical excellence regime: while the discourse of serving the nation provides students with a strong sense of purpose and privileged educational resources, its institutional translation into evaluation metrics, accelerated research trajectories, and competitive selection mechanisms generates tensions between moral aspiration and lived experience. In response, students in these programmes develop a form of “negotiated loyalty.” As active recontextualizers, they navigate competing discourses of patriotic contribution, academic autonomy, self-realization, and personal security, revealing multiple contradictions within China’s nation-centric excellence regime. This finding moves scholarship on scientific nationalism beyond macro-level discourse analysis by foregrounding its micro-level implications for subject formation. It further suggests that, in the Chinese context, elite scientific identity extends beyond academic achievement and is continually produced through negotiation between the competing expectations of “excellence” and “loyalty.” Overall, the study illustrates how China’s nation-centric excellence regime shapes elite education and contributes to global debates on affective governance, scientific nationalism, and identity formation in higher education.</p>