A crucial mechanism for both trends is the internet, once hailed as a great liberator and now revealed as something rather different — a surveillance engine that the N.K.V.D. could only dream about, a machine that induces its users to trade privacy for entertainment and distraction, and a panopticon whose global expanse exposes anyone who wants to do business in China to the manufactured consensus of Chinese nationalism, the grievance politics of the Politburo.

China’s influence within American industry is evident well beyond the online realm, of course. But its successful censorship of U.S. businesses generally involves websites, app stores, social media. It’s not a coincidence that the National Basketball Association’s supine behavior toward China in the past week — from what is supposedly the most progressive and politically engagé of the American professional sports leagues — followed from a general manager fleetingly expressing support for the Hong Kong protesters on Twitter. Likewise when China induced Marriott to fire a luckless $14-an-hour worker recently, it was for seeming to endorse Tibetan independence by “favoriting” a tweet. Having figured out how to tame their internet, the Chinese are intent on using commercial power to tame ours.

How afraid should this make us? One possibility is that just as Chimerican optimism was once delusional, so now Chimerican fears are overblown. The Chinese regime has capabilities that outstrip Soviet Russia, but deep weaknesses as well. China’s demographic picture is potentially disastrous, its economic surge may be leveling off, many of its best and brightest are eager to depart, and it has more to lose than America from constant trade brinksmanship, a trans-Pacific Cold War footing. As with fears of Japanese dominance in the 1990s, some Sinophobes may overrate the internal strength of the Chinese model, the permanence of its ascent.

But one can believe that China may be somewhat weaker than it looks and also believe that the fear of the People’s Republic is a healthy thing for Americans to cultivate. For one thing, our policy approach to Chinese power clearly needs adjustment, and yet there are many high-dollar reasons for our elite to protect their Chimerican entanglements — with “elite” here including not only the influence-peddlers of D.C. and Silicon Valley, but also figures like Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, whose professional obligations induced him to draw shameful analogies between America’s sins and Chinese totalitarianism this week.

Given those elite incentives, the only way our China policy will be permanently adjusted is if the outrage that bubbled against the N.B.A. in recent days becomes a permanent factor in American politics, a sentiment that cannot be ignored.