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Chinese higher education policy texts appear to suggest that training ‘para-diplomats’ is a goal of China’s international student recruitment. However, few studies have considered the ways such policies are recontextualised and implemented at the institutional (meso-) level and become integral to students’ career pathways after graduation. To address this paucity, I purposefully selected two Chinese higher education institutions (HEIs) and undertook an ethnographic study to explore their policy work of translation. Basil Bernstein’s notions of classification and framing are employed here to nuance the mechanisms by which hidden messages were deliberately sent out by case-study institutions in everyday practices and processes. The findings reveal that routine aspects of university life, including visual cues, events and activities, and interactions between teachers and students, differed in their strengths of classification and framing, which either expanded or limited the range of career pathways that international students could envisage or progress to. This study offers a valuable contribution to the literature on higher education policy ‘implementation studies’, especially in the Chinese context, adding to our understandings about the powerful influence of the hidden curriculum on international students’ career choice. The implications of China’s experiences are discussed in terms of the role played by HEIs in the nexus of shaping graduates’ career choice and enhancing the national soft power.