A Tale of an engagement transformed: The United Kingdom's geopolitical approach to China in discourse and practice (2010-2024)

This study examines the evolution of the United Kingdom's discursive and practical approach to China in light of the geopolitical discourse analysis, a concept that has been developed as part of critical geopolitics studies. Focusing on the period of the successive Conservative Party governments, which lasted in the UK from 2010 to early 2024, it first investigates the UK's general and China-specific geopolitical discourse in which there are subjectively and self-interestedly constructed premises about the world, Britain itself and China. After that, the study probes into the UK's practical relations with China in three sectors that are categorized as political, economic and tech-related affairs. For each sectoral section, there are sub-sections in which the practical policy implementations are checked against the related discursive premises, with the objective of identifying the parallels and contrasts between the UK's discourse and practice regarding China. In the conclusion, the findings that are dispersed throughout different chapters and sections are brought together and summarized, firstly in the context of the theoretical and conceptual framework, and secondly in light of this study's main and sub-research questions. The study concludes that the UK has adopted a precautionary engagement perspective in its most recent China discourse. In practice, however, its relations with China have severely deteriorated, resulting in a great deal of mistrust, anger and suspicion towards China. As a result, the engagement part has been extremely eclipsed in practical relations, if not completely eradicated, by precautionary tendencies that have produced many confrontational and balancing policy implementations towards China. Keywords: Critical Geopolitics, Geopolitical Discourse, British Foreign Policy, UK Foreign Policy, UK – China Relations