News Analysis From the beginning of his reign, Xi Jinping has been preaching China’s need to end U.S. world dominance, create Chinese independence, and rewrite the global social order. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ascribes names to the various plans and initiatives that it hopes will culminate in Chinese global domination, including “Made in China 2025” (MIC 25), the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), “common prosperity,” “dual circulation,” and a host of other initiatives. Recently, Xi has stepped up the nationalist rhetoric, but it seems that MIC 25 and the BRI have fallen victims to China’s zero-tolerance COVID-19 policy and Xi’s crackdown on everything. Now, Xi is promoting an intensified version of his earlier independence and global conquest narratives, but he appears to believe China will achieve world domination by cracking down internally, rather than expanding abroad. When MIC 2025 was announced in May 2015, the goal was to invest …