WASHINGTON — A few weeks after Stephen K. Bannon left the White House in August, he was invited to a dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations to discuss American policy toward China. With his unbridled China bashing and dark talk of a looming conflict in the Pacific, Mr. Bannon expected to be roughed up by the group, which included China scholars, writers and veterans from past Republican and Democratic administrations.

Mr. Bannon’s hosts were hard on him, but not in the way he expected. Rather than faulting him or his former boss, President Trump, for their hostile approach, they pressed him on why Mr. Trump had not followed through with his tough talk about trade and North Korea. “I walked out of there thinking, ‘Something has changed with the elite,’” he recalled.

China’s relentless rise and its more recent embrace of repressive tactics that recall the Mao era — a process accelerated by President Xi Jinping’s bid to stay in power indefinitely — have fractured a deeply rooted consensus in Washington about the long-term direction of its relationship with Beijing.

Gone is a widespread agreement among diplomats, scholars and businesspeople that China is gradually converging with the United States and, therefore, that Americans should work to manage any flare-ups between the two countries. With China now unabashedly charting its own course — one that diverges rather than converges with the liberal democracies and market economies of the West — conflict, many say, is inevitable.