A couple of weeks ago, Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, complained indignantly about China’s current and bitter hostility toward multinational corporations. According to the Financial Times, Immelt groused at a private dinner in Rome that the Chinese government was becoming ever more protectionist. “I am not sure that in the end, they want any of us to win, or any of us to be successful,” he said.

Immelt’s remarks point to a noteworthy shift in the dynamic that moves American policy toward China, one tinged with irony. Over the past two decades, the business community has been more upbeat about China than any other constituency in American society. Business leaders led the charge in loosening trade restrictions with China. They dismissed concerns about human rights with the argument that the simple presence of multinational companies in China would conduce to political liberalization.

However, over the past year or two, and to their evident surprise, their earlier assurances were revealed to have gotten things exactly backward. Immelt was merely the latest representative of corporate America to ring the alarm about restrictions on business operations in China, taking his cue from the leaders of Google and other major companies. Both the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing and the European Chamber of Commerce in China have issued reports in recent months conceding that the business climate for foreign companies there has steadily worsened.

American and European companies have vied for centuries, through all of China’s upheavals, to dominate what used to be called “the China market.” Now, increasingly, China wants to keep that market for itself. It opened up to foreign companies in the 1980s and 1990s not because it believed in free trade or because it thought the visitors were wise and wonderful, but rather because it wanted their technology and know-how. But China no longer needs the multinational companies as it once did. The Chinese government has proved ever more adept at running an industrial policy that privileges its own companies, many of them state-owned.

In turn, the disenchantment of the Western business community colors the larger political and diplomatic landscape. In the past, corporate executives would lobby their presidents or prime ministers for an improved relationship with Beijing, one, needless to add, that would open the way for more investment and trade. That was the world Bill Clinton faced in the 1990s. But today, CEOs descend upon Washington or European capitals to ask their presidents or prime ministers to adopt a tougher stance with Beijing in commercial disputes.