Choose the BEST answer from the box below for each blank in the passages. Seeking cross-border education has been a global trend, particularly for the past two decades. The trend can be more salient in Chinese higher education landscape because in the ten-year timeframe (2009–2018), the number of international enrollments in China has been more than doubled. 31 Thus, the multicultural university environment can provide a platform for intergroup contact between domestic and international students in China. 32 To that end, our work is anchored within the anxiety/uncertainty management (AUM) theory. The AUM is developed to explain perceived effectiveness of intercultural communication and asserts that reduction of intergroup anxiety (an affective factor) and intergroup uncertainty (a cognitive factor) may act as basic causes of communication effectiveness. 33 Additionally, the AUM argues that there may be an array of superficial causes (e.g., identities, self-esteem, and perceived similarities) affecting anxiety and uncertainty. And intergroup contact is one of these superficial causes and its effect on perceived effectiveness may be mediated by anxiety and uncertainty. (A) Specifically, individuals in intergroup encounters can effectively communicate if they can manage levels of anxiety and accurately predict outgroup members’ feelings, attitudes, and behaviors. (B) Our work aims to test whether and through what mechanisms their contact with each other can contribute to intercultural communication effectiveness that is increasingly considered as a pivotal student outcome in the globalized world featured by interconnectedness and interdependence. (C) China is now the third largest host country of international students, just behind the U.S. and UK. (D) To fill in the gap, our work presents two studies, targeting domestic university students (majority group) and international students (minority group) in China, respectively.