BEIJING, China – There are taboo subjects in China. The “three Ts”—Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen—and the “three Es”—employment, environment, economy. All are discussable, but only inside narrow guardrails: the first trio with extreme caution; the second, chiefly as stories of improvement.

I arrived in China in 2010 and depart this September. After a week here, the joke goes, you’re an expert; after 15 years, you realize how little you actually know.

Even so, I can say this with confidence: the optimism that animated 2010 has thinned. The country has known deprivation and astonishing success. It engineered the largest exit from extreme poverty in recorded history; hundreds of millions saw their living standards climb. After Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party steadied itself, embraced the need for change, and—gradually—threw its weight behind Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.

For decades, the prevailing promise was that tomorrow would be better than today. That credo no longer holds. Parents hesitate to tell their children that they will enjoy a higher standard of living. Few foresee a return to Cultural Revolution–style turmoil, but a slow stagnation has set in. You hear it in conversations on trains and in coffee shops: new graduates juggling internships, developers trimming ambitions, local governments counting yuan. The mood is not panic so much as drift—a quiet calculation that the old formula of ever-expanding opportunity is no longer guaranteed.

Stagnation begets a new mood. The bargain that helped define the 21st century is wobbling. The Party struck an unwritten pact with the public: rising prosperity in exchange for political nonparticipation. As expectations drift downward, a feeling of having less to lose grows. If growth no longer delivers, why not ask for a larger voice?

The irony is sharp.

China was pivotal in stabilizing the global economy after the 2008 crash. In 2007, GDP growth reached 13 percent; by late 2008, in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ collapse, fourth-quarter growth had fallen to 6.8 percent.

Beijing moved quickly. A vast stimulus jolted its own economy—and became a life raft for much of Asia and, by extension, the West.

Through the pre-COVID years, Asia, led by China, maintained healthy growth. But China has yet to shake off COVID’s drag. Layered atop that, President Trump has refocused U.S. policy squarely on countering China, a shift that is reshaping the political landscape.

Amid these pressures, an under-noticed development in August suggested a different vector: the resumption of direct flights between India and China. For the world’s two most populous nations, this is less a scheduling tweak than a diplomatic signal. Both now seem to recognize they can advance their goals more quickly by working around Washington and—invoking the diplomats’ favorite cliché—“strengthening ties.”

That is no small feat. Only recently did conflict seem likelier than commerce. A deadly border clash in 2020 threatened to spiral into something worse. And both capitals appear to have concluded that, simply put, President Trump cannot be relied upon. The final irony may be this: for a leader fixated on winning a Nobel Peace Prize, his inadvertent achievement—nudging India and China toward rapprochement—has largely gone unnoticed.