Navigating the liberal international order: strategy, identity and diplomacy in China’s high-level dialogues with European counterparts (2001–2025)

This thesis examines how China navigates and selectively recalibrates the Liberal International Order (LIO) through three institutionalised high-level dialogues with Europe: the High-Level People-to-People Dialogue (PPD), the High-Level Strategic Dialogue (SD), and the High-Level Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD). The empirical analysis spans 2001–2025 and draws on 131 dialogue rounds and 147 official documents and outcome statements across these three dialogue mechanisms. The European counterparts examined include the EU, the UK, France, and Germany across all three dialogues, alongside Portugal, Poland, and Switzerland for the SD and Italy for the EFD. The thesis argues that China is best understood as a Strategist–Reformist Actor (SRA): a rising power that consolidates legitimacy through institutional embedding while incrementally recalibrating norms from within. It advances a mid-range analytical framework linking strategic identity (SRA), institutional practice (Institutionalisation as Diplomacy), and a patterned outcome (Continuity-with-Recalibration). Together, this framework explains how major powers—rising and established alike—may pursue reform through continuity rather than rupture within the LIO. Empirically, the thesis provides the first systematic, multi-level, cross-venue, cross-domain, longitudinal analysis of the three institutional pillars of China–Europe relations. Methodologically, it develops a document-driven interpretive design combining grounded-theory coding, abductive reasoning, and complementary interviews, treating official texts as curated artefacts of strategic identity performance. Conceptually, it specifies how institutionalised dialogue mechanisms stabilise cooperation while enabling calibrated normative adjustment. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that China’s engagement with Europe is characterised by continuity-with-recalibration: a patterned dynamic through which stability and incremental transformation coexist within dense institutional environments. Beyond the China–Europe case, the framework offers transferable insight into how institutionalised diplomacy functions as a site of strategic reform in a contested yet enduring international order.