Strategy and diplomacy in a changing world: China’s high-level strategic dialogues with European counterparts (2001–2025)

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>High-level strategic dialogues (SDs) constitute a central political pillar of China–Europe relations, yet their strategic functioning as institutionalised dialogue mechanisms remains under-examined. This paper investigates how China employs the SD mechanism to engage with Europe and pursue its foreign-policy objectives within the liberal international order (LIO). The study adopts a document-driven qualitative design combining grounded-theory coding with abductive reasoning. The dataset comprises 59 China-issued SD records corresponding to 75 dialogue rounds between 2001 and 2025. Using the complementary analytical lenses of forum shopping and altercasting, the analysis examines how differentiated dialogue venues and signalling repertoires structure expectations of cooperation, responsibility, disagreement management, and systemic roles within institutionalised interaction. The findings show that China’s SD engagement operates through a differentiated dialogue architecture combined with recurring signalling practices that stabilise participation across institutional settings while enabling incremental reinterpretation of governance vocabularies and role expectations. Building on these empirical patterns, the paper advances a mid-range interpretive framework linking strategic identity (the strategist–reformist actor), institutional practice (institutionalisation as diplomacy), and the patterned outcome of continuity with recalibration. The analysis demonstrates how routinised diplomatic engagement within institutionalised dialogue mechanisms can simultaneously sustain interactional continuity and facilitate incremental normative recalibration, contributing to broader debates on major-power behaviour toward the LIO.</jats:p>