BEIJING — Netflix has a nifty new China strategy: Skip it.

In January, the video-streaming service announced an ambitious global expansion. The goal was to beam American hits such as “House of Cards” around the world including, eventually, in China.

“Today you are witnessing the birth of a new global internet TV network,” said Chief Executive Reed Hastings at a tech conference.

Sending racy American content into a country that censors almost everything may have seemed like a leap, but Netflix was confident.

Less than a year later, having launched just about everywhere else, Netflix shelved the streaming project. It opted instead to license some content to Chinese providers for “modest” revenues, according to a quarterly letter. (Representatives of the company declined to comment.)

For some high-flying U.S. internet businesses, the China dream is fading; for others, it looks radically different from what they had hoped. California's internet companies once dreamed of liberating China with technology, thinking that the system of censorship known as the Great Firewall would inevitably crumble, paving the way for their advance in the world's most populous nation.

But President Xi Jinping has tightened, rather than loosened, control of the internet and increased restrictions on foreign companies. Six years after Google retreated from China's search-engine business over censorship and hacking concerns, U.S. firms seem more willing than ever to play the Communist Party's game — they just can't win it.

Even if they can gain a foothold, there is practically no way they will be able to overtake the Chinese companies that have comfortably established themselves.

Facebook's China charm offensive, which included Mark Zuckerberg studying Mandarin, has yielded little. Google's search business and Twitter remain blocked. LinkedIn and Microsoft censor — and still, neither is a major player in China's online space. Amazon.com is sputtering along against the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. After great initial success, Apple is being overtaken by local upstarts.

Still, tech companies are pushing, and they are looking to the incoming Trump administration for help breaking in.

Bill Bishop, a tech consultant who writes Sinocism, an influential China newsletter, said he has seen waves of confident U.S. firms humbled by efforts to crack the China market.

“Each generation believes they can find a way, but the Chinese Communist Party has upped their game in terms of censorship, and these companies that nobody has heard about 10 years ago — now they are the biggest companies in the world,” he said, referring to corporate behemoths such as Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi and Baidu, sometimes called the Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google of China.

U.S. companies considering a China move often talk about the “LinkedIn model” — a model that means close local ties and full cooperation with the government.

Acting local — or, indeed, operating at all — means playing by local rules, even when those rules run counter to the idea of free expression and association. LinkedIn's Chinese site censors content and puts limits on forming groups. LinkedIn Chief Executive Jeff Weiner has described the company's introduction of a Chinese-language version as involving “compromises that are far from ideal and can be very painful.”

LinkedIn did not agree to an interview for this article.

Unlike when Google and Yahoo were hauled in to testify before Congress for censoring content a decade ago, LinkedIn's censorship has earned the company a small amount of bad press, but has not been treated as a major story. LinkedIn's bigger challenge is competing in the Chinese market. Its Chinese site has more than 20 million users — fair by U.S. standards, but diminutive for a Chinese social network, analysts said.

The titans of U.S. technology are facing some of the toughest challenges yet.

Despite recent reports that Facebook is building a “censorship tool” to help secure access to the Chinese market, the social network remains blocked, with little chance of that changing any time soon, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because of its sensitivity. To comply with Chinese law and regulations, Facebook would need to drastically change its product, experts said.

If the company were to secure the requisite permits to operate — and that's a big if — it's not clear that it would succeed.

China's government has ramped up its focus on innovation and helped build an alternate universe where local technology rules.

Facebook would need to compete, for instance, with Tencent's WeChat, a chat service with more than 800 million active users.

“When I think about Facebook in China, I think, ‘What's their advantage?'?” said William Bao Bean, a Shanghai-based partner at SOSV and the managing director of Chinaccelerator, which invests in start-ups. “Their product is so outpaced by the local companies.”

Facebook declined a request for comment.

Carmen Chang, a partner at the Silicon Valley firm New Enterprise Associates and a longtime China dealmaker, said ambitious companies will take the long view in China — strengthening their ties and waiting for new opportunities. “China is too important a market for these companies to settle for a Plan B,” she said. “Some companies will never give up.”

Others wonder why Silicon Valley stays optimistic.

“The people at the top are used to moving forward at cyber-speed, not to being pushed aside, blocked, for reasons that are not based on the technology or based on somebody having a better idea — it's just foreign to their way of thinking,” said Lester Ross, a managing partner at WilmerHale in Beijing, who advises U.S. and Chinese companies.

“If you can afford it, it's patience and hope that things change. I don't see signs of that in front of us in the near term,” he said.