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In this article, we develop a genealogy of international education studies' tenets of culture shock and skills deficit. To trace their emergence, we map the discursive shifts which underpinned cultural anthropology's involvement in the administration of US colonial, domestic, and international affairs respectively in the early 1900s and 1950s. These shifts are concomitantly linked to the formation of the field of intercultural communication, of which popularisation in the form of Hofstede model of "cultural distance" has structured international education when turning from a Cold War tool of total diplomacy to an export industry. Taking the development of international education in Australia as a case study, we demonstrate how the shifts in the disciplinary fields aforementioned are best understood as an anti-racist strategy, which mobilisation of the concept of culture has led to the paradoxical evacuation of the heuristic of race from the lexicon of intercultural contact between "Asian" international students and presumably white host institutions.

In this article, we delve into the characterisation of international students as "Confucian Heritage" learners. To appreciate the implications of such iterative interpellation, we develop a genealogy of Sinology, which is here approached as the discursive effect of a colonial epistemic division of the world into free and democratic West and civilised and yet authoritarian East. In mapping the deployment of such heuristic in the management of international affairs during and after historical colonialism, we moreover demonstrate how the derivative characterisation of international students as "rote", "dependent", and inherently "prone to plagiarism" learners has been used to explain racism without race -- that is, the epistemic exclusion of international students as a matter caused by factors other than race: lack of socially relevant cultural skills and communication barriers.