This paper explores the understudied topic of international student sojourners' emotional intercultural competence in higher education by analysing Chinese postgraduate students' experiences of managing their emotions evoked during intercultural communication at a British university. Through ethnographic interviews, this study examines how students construct their emotion-management experiences as well as the effects of social interaction on the construction processes of these experiences. The findings shed light on the motives and pathways for deploying specific emotional intercultural competencies in practice. Furthermore, the findings manifest the central role of the interplay between individual agency and societal forces in shaping the substances, facilitators, constraints, two-way interactivity and dialectical tensions of emotional intercultural competencies that unfold in specific interpersonal, moral and structural contexts. By representing competence as a repertoire of action strategies performed by individuals to address their important concerns and by illuminating the meanings of competence in particular environments at particular moments, this study moves beyond the traditional 'list' approach which largely conceptualises competencies as fixed, individual-based and universal entities. The study emphasises the importance of taking a holistic, process-oriented, context-based and dialectical perspective in developing a deeper level of competence for empowering individuals engaged in intercultural communication. In addition, this study discusses practical implications regarding the development of emotion-management strategies towards competence for intercultural education in higher education.