In the past few decades, the number of international Chinese students in Higher Education has increased rapidly. Recent studies have found that despite international Chinese students attaining the required language level for entry to courses, they are still facing many difficulties in conducting their academic activities. The aim of the current study is to identify a factor that can better predict international Chinese students’ academic performance in addition to vocabulary knowledge. This study is an attempt to use an interdisciplinary approach to combine a linguistic factor, vocabulary knowledge, with the non-linguistic factor, intercultural communicative competence in explaining performance. The results reveal that intercultural communicative competence can explain over 30% of students’ academic performance at the end of the academic year. It is concluded that when students’ English language proficiency is high, it is the understanding of the culture and the communication with the local people, which is more important in these international Chinese students’ abroad study.