A couple of weeks ago, a young crowd in Shanghai came out in force to celebrate Halloween. The street where I live filled with revelers dressed in a range of elaborate costumes — as the white-clad enforcers of China’s Covid lockdowns, as Chinese courtesans or, simply, as a watermelon. Halloween allows us to dress up as something that we can’t otherwise be. It’s a strong impulse right now in China, which remains stuck in a post-pandemic malaise marked by job shortages, a trend of disillusioned 20-somethings dropping out of the work force and society and a general yearning for a different way to be.

These young people in China are much like their American counterparts. Many feel they are living in a world that worked well for their parents but isn’t working as well for them. Young people in America view China as less of a threat to the United States than their parents do and worry more about things that affect all of us. This includes climate change, which cannot be adequately addressed without cooperation between China and the United States, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

Yet, as the aging leaders of China and the United States meet on Wednesday in San Francisco, there is the usual talk of unavoidable rivalry, intractable disputes on trade, technology and Taiwan and low expectations for the meeting. It is as if conflict between the two countries is something preordained, like an asteroid moving across a fixed path in the sky. But neither the United States nor China is a static entity; both are rapidly changing.

America and its hawkish politicians must stop viewing China’s Communist-led system as some immutable, monolithic foe to be vanquished; intergenerational transformation in China is well underway. When I first moved to China in 2008 at age 21, most Americans still harbored clichéd images of China, of a faraway land where the masses clogged streets on their bicycles or toiled away manufacturing the world’s goods. Some of those old tropes are rooted in reality. China’s older generations were, in fact, “builder” generations like the Americans of the 1950s, laying down rules, roads and lines on the map en route to turning China into the world’s factory. By China’s own admission, it is still modernizing.

But the sons and daughters of those builders are growing up in a very different world from their parents. They inherited the basic structure — of a nation that is rising once again, ready to make its mark on the world — but they will inevitably want to fill in how it looks and feels, and will challenge older mores in the process. There is widespread and growing discussion, for instance, of how to make Chinese society more equitable, green, urban and scientific. China is undergoing a profound transition to a high-tech, highly educated, prosperous and powerful nation that its “builder generation” could only imagine.

Live in China for a while and you realize that it’s not collapsing any time soon, despite what hawks in the United States might hope. Despite China’s unsteady transition away from low-cost labor and manufacturing toward innovation and consumption, its economy is still growing, albeit more slowly than in the past. Even as China builds coal plants, it has become a global renewables superpower, an exporter of electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines. Its tendency to be friendly with governments with which America is not, such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, means that American diplomats increasingly ask Beijing to use its leverage, including in the current Middle East turmoil. And in frontier technologies like artificial intelligence, experts agree that a discussion without China amounts to the West talking to itself.