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This paper maps out contemporary discourses of Chinese diplomacy that have proliferated under the aegis of ‘major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics’. We examine how these narratives are underpinned by webs of relationality that see China promoting equal and win–win partnerships with other state actors, yet are also defined by hierarchical premises for such diplomatic engagements. These relational contradictions are most clearly manifested when we interrogate the spatial dynamics of China’s diplomatic endeavours through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). By scrutinising the geopolitical imaginations, sites and scales associated with the BRI, we turn attention to three spatial tensions that are closely bounded up with the relational contradictions of Chinese diplomacy: ‘win–win’ diplomacy promoting a ‘harmonious world’ versus territorially based diplomacy; periphery diplomacy versus the global ambitions of BRI; and the centralisation versus decentralisation dimensions of Chinese diplomacy. This allows us to make sense of the multiplicity of descriptors that have been affixed to Chinese diplomacy, in order to underscore the ‘work’ they perform to bequeath (at times, divergent and contested) meanings to China’s new foreign policy approach. Hence, a relational and spatial understanding of Chinese diplomacy, we argue, can reveal a more nuanced picture of the promises, potential and disjunctures of China’s rapidly expanding geopolitical and diplomatic actions on the international stage.

Mapping Chinese Diplomacy: Relational Contradictions and Spatial Tensions