International students undergo both language and academic culture shocks in their study in destination countries such as the UK, the US and Australia. However, most of the research on international students tends to adopt a deficit discourse when portraying this group of students. This research is a response to the call of researchers in the field for a paradigm shift that focuses on international students' agency and asset. Using the agency theory and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) model as the framework, this study reports findings from a qualitative study of 22 Chinese students on 2 + 2 joint programs between an Australian university and four Chinese higher education institutions. While the in-depth interview findings support past studies about the language and academic culture shocks that international students experience, more importantly this study reveals that Chinese international students exercised agency by leveraging mainly four forms of CCW--navigational capital, linguistic capital, social capital and inspirational capital to overcome language and academic culture shocks. Chinese students' agentic exercise reveals temporal and social nature of their agency: It is not only informed by their habitus, directed and guided by the emerging demands and future goals, but also embedded in social engagement. Implications and policy advice for program managers on both sides of the joint programs as well as for host university teaching staff are discussed.