The Fed’s recent enforcement cases reflect this focus on individual wrongdoing. In 2015, the Fed chose to bar six bankers from the industry, twice the number in 2014. The year before that, the Fed did not take any such actions.

And just last month, the Fed took action against a former Goldman Sachs executive, seeking to bar him from the industry in a case that stemmed from 2014, when a junior Goldman employee received confidential government information from a Federal Reserve employee in New York. The Fed also fined Goldman $36 million.

When the China hiring investigation first came to light in a front-page article in The New York Times three years ago, it was the latest regulatory woe to plague the bank. It came on the heels of the bank’s so-called London whale trading scandal, in which its traders lost $6 billion in bungled derivative bets, and around the time a mortgage settlement with the Justice Department cost $13 billion.

Billions of dollars in fines later, the bank has largely retreated from the spotlight, which now appears to shine on Wells Fargo and other rivals.

Even so, the government’s roughly $200 million settlement with JPMorgan in the China case could draw attention from lawmakers who argue that banks are too big — and systemically important — to indict. No individual employees are expected to be criminally charged, the people briefed on the matter said, and the bank will probably receive a nonprosecution agreement, a form of corporate probation that comes in exchange for concessions and penalties.

Alternatively, prosecutors could have sought a criminal guilty plea, or a deferred-prosecution agreement, which involves the filing of charges that are deferred and is generally viewed as more onerous than a nonprosecution deal. With the growth in guilty pleas and deferred-prosecution agreements on Wall Street, nonprosecution deals have become less common for Wall Street banks.

Ultimately, evidence in the case may have limited the options for prosecutors, who have a higher burden of proof than the S.E.C. For one thing, there is nothing inherently illicit about hiring well-connected people, and prosecutors may have struggled to show an explicit quid pro quo from the bank to Chinese officials. And in many cases, the job or internship candidates may have been qualified anyway, or JPMorgan may have secured the business regardless of the hiring. JPMorgan’s lawyers also urged prosecutors not to criminalize hiring practices — including something as simple as awarding an internship — that were common in the region.