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China's rise and its increasing importance to international relations as a discipline-defining phenomenon is well recognized and is reflected in the ever-growing scholarship dedicated to understanding China's politics. Yet, within this body of work, little is known about China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), its diplomats and the role it plays in China's international politics. Mirroring international relations' disciplinary focus on the state, the exceptional and the visible, much of this literature ignores the quotidian and banal activities of actors that produce diplomacy, while frequently dismissing MOFA's importance. This thesis takes the Chinese case as its foil to extend the insights of a Bourdieu-inspired practice theory. At the same time, it uses the practice approach to shed light on the understudied yet significant practices, materials, sites and institutions of contemporary Chinese diplomacy. This study makes three main contributions to the literature on practice theory and China's international politics. First, arguing against prevailing interpretations of Chinese foreign policy and the elision of the Foreign Ministry, it presents evidence to show the centrality and influence of the ministry and its diplomats. This is done through an interrogation of Chinese diplomatic practices where MOFA's capacities to counsel, implement and coordinate become discernible. Through this examination, it also explains how material objects can co-produce practices. Second, filling a small but important gap within the practice literature, the study highlights examples of transversal disruptions - the potentially disruptive effects of field overlaps. This is most apparent in transnational fields such as the ASEAN-China and multilateral track-two diplomatic sites where the operative logic from the Chinese diplomatic field is brought to bear in this space. Third, in thinking with and against Bourdieu, the concept of an organizational habitus is introduced. This serves as a more precise heuristic tool, to study MOFA as an institutional actor, where it develops dispositions, perceives and reacts to the social world around it. Accordingly, a link is drawn between MOFA's organizational habitus and China's identity, hence giving an account of how the ministry's habitus engender practices that is used by non-Chinese diplomatic actors to form perceptions of her state identity.

Partial Discharges are symptoms of insulation degradation that continually promotes the deterioration of the insulation condition, eventually leading to permanent failures. The PD event itself is not dangerous but it is the state of the discharge activity that can lead to unforeseen failures. Hence continuous monitoring of PD enables the prevention of these unforeseen failures that result in economic losses. High voltage equipment that has been installed more than forty years ago is highly susceptible to PD since it is reaching the insulation end life. For the case of underground cables, continuous PD monitoring will help avoid unplanned outages and the need for the immediate replacement of faulty cable sections that will incur large costs. Traditionally, PD diagnostics have been carried out through offline methods, whereby the cable specimen is removed from service during the diagnostic tests. On the other hand, online PD diagnostics are preferable since the services are not disrupted. However, there are some major challenges that come with the online approach. For instance, heavy noise interference, the detection and location of PD through the interpretation of measured signals. Presented in this Thesis are presented novel contributions to the area of online PD detection for underground HV cables. The work encompasses aspects of physical data acquisition procedures and the post-processing signal processing algorithms. A new online PD data acquisition unit equipped with pre-processing and signal conditioning is presented. The system has other features that take into account the difficulties of logistics as well as issues related to the regulations and protocols of the utility. The primary aim of this developed system is to produce a PD database that will be used for research purposes. Since applied wavelets for the field of PD diagnostics have been popular amongst researchers, it was investigated further in this Thesis. Following from the data acquisition system, large data sizes required intensive processing. A new wavelet-based algorithm combined with the use of Higher Order Statistics is presented. This algorithm enables the simplification of data signals to highlight potential PD activity resulting in the reduction of manual examination of wavelet algorithms. The conventional wavelet algorithms applied in the literature generally referred to a specific approach of the wavelet implementation i. e. the decimated approach. However, it was found that the non-decimated approach has several advantages with regards to PD signature detection and PD location. The application of both approaches and their comparisons is applied to simulated data as well as online field data. Finally, the analysis of online PD data acquired from the new data acquisition system is presented. Several PD characterisation processes are applied and positive results were generated. Aspects relating to the physical environments of test site are also included. The challenges and experiences gathered in this research project are described.