“I feel a lot of us have been hopeful that in engagement, China will change,” said Jianying Zha, a journalist and author. “It did not happen.”

China’s pride and growing nationalism challenge American interests, said Elizabeth Economy, the director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. China is exporting its values, including control over the internet and citizen surveillance. “It is precisely at the intersection of that repression at home and ambition abroad that is particularly troubling,” she said.

Mr. Friedman agreed: “China is so much more open than it was 30 years ago and so much more closed” than it was 10 years ago.

Human rights issues are growing, said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch. “I think that the world has for many reasons been slow to respond, and I think that’s a function of ignorance, of greed, of normalization,” she said.

Ms. Economy and Ms. Richardson took issue with Huawei’s sponsorship of the DealBook conference, and of the Times’s past publication of paid ads for the state-controlled China Daily. Ms. Richardson said she would have liked to have known about the Huawei sponsorship in advance.

“It’s extraordinary that The New York Times, yes, runs the paid advertising from The China Daily, but would also have a conference supported by Huawei when The New York Times itself is banned in China,” Ms. Economy added.