Abstract: Against the backdrop of China’s international education shifting from scale expansion to quality improvement, cultivating international talents who understand China, love China, and are friendly to China has become a core educational goal in the new era. The study is guided by policy frameworks such as The Higher Education Quality Standards for International Students in China (Trial). It also integrates theories of cross-cultural adaptation and social identity. Based on these, the study constructs a two-dimensional analytical framework for educational effectiveness grounded in “satisfaction” and “identification”. This study uses survey data from 212 international students across 14 undergraduate institutions in Jiangxi Province. It adopts the triad of “understanding China, loving China, and being friendly to China” as the measurement standard for educational effectiveness, systematically evaluating the implementation outcomes of Chinese cognitive education for international students. International students’ cognition of China exhibits a shallow-deep stratification pattern: they show high familiarity with everyday cultural elements, but low awareness of institutional and classical cultural aspects. Their knowledge acquisition displays a brand-focus phenomenon, characterized by a high recognition rate of cultural symbols yet insufficient mastery of deeper cultural knowledge. The overall satisfaction level of international students with studying and living in China reaches 80.18%, with extremely high levels of recognition toward China’s public security and technological innovation, laying a solid emotional foundation for loving China. Their intention to be friendly to China is strong; however, notable deficiencies in social interaction hinder the deep transformation from understanding China to loving China and being friendly to China. Accordingly, this study follows the policy orientation of the new era. It constructs a tripartite educational goal system of understanding China, loving China and being friendly to China, so as to realize the transformation of educational effectiveness from experiential satisfaction to deep identification. It also recommends leveraging Jiangxi’s distinctive cultural resources, such as red culture, ceramic culture, and academy culture, to develop a regionally distinctive cultural education model.