Abstract In line with the agenda of internationalization and the educational language planning informed by the Belt and Road Initiative, an increasing number of universities in China launched international Master’s degree programs that adopt English and/or Chinese as the medium of instruction. These programs are aimed at attracting international students to pursue postgraduate degrees in China. Whether students can learn the academic Chinese language and discipline-specific content knowledge well is critical for both the quality of the international Chinese-medium-instruction programs and the strategic agenda of promoting the Chinese language as a lingua franca as well as enhancing the status of Chinese-mediated scholarly works in the global academic arena. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of research on the teaching-and-learning status quo of courses in those Chinese-medium-instruction programs. Drawing on translanguaging as the theoretical lens, this article reports a multi-case study on how international students in Chinese-medium-instruction Master’s degree programs translanguage when learning the discipline-specific Chinese for academic purposes and disciplinary knowledge in four departments of a Shanghai university. Our study found that the curriculum design needs to provide adequate support for learning academic Chinese and critically reflect on the global inequality in knowledge production. Meanwhile, translanguaging helps international students with a diversity of life trajectories co-construct an ecosystem of learning that embraces internationalization as facilitated by a multilingual and critical epistemic vision in Chinese universities. Language policy and pedagogy implications are also discussed at the end of the article.
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