The problematic of the research reported in this paper, namely the place of Chinese knowledge in educational research in Australia provides an opportunity to use Rancire's work to rethink the place of ignorance in the supervisory pedagogies used in internationalising education. Because its scope and character is quite variable, consideration is given to four heterogeneous but interdependent approaches to deciding what counts as ignorance. This raises several important theoretical and pedagogical questions about the correspondence between economic power, what we know and what we do with our ignorance; the agency of international students in articulating their intellectual heritage through Western educational research, and the potential of intellectual resources available from China being used by students from there when undertaking research aboard. Eight working principles are provided to inform debates among care-full and conscientious supervisors' interested in engaging, pedagogically with their cross-cultural ignorance.