Drawing on government and university documents, in-depth interviews, surveys, and content data, this paper provides a processual explanation of how the U.S. tenure system as an organizational model rapidly diffused across Chinese universities in the 2010s: the Chinese central state's top-down instrumental strategies--sharply focused on the "up-or-out" mechanism of the U.S. tenure system to boost faculty publication and build world-class universities, while downplaying post-tenure rights and academic freedom--provided the initial impetus for the diffusion. Following top-down demands, Chinese universities adopted organization-level instrumental strategies, such as uniform requirements on state grants and zero-sum game among junior faculty members, aligning universities' resources and incentives with the state-led tenure reform and accelerating the spread of the tenure system. Furthermore, the tenure reform penetrated deeper into the higher education system as universities and faculty members devised various informal adaptations to increase the success rates of tenure reviews and reduce faculty resistance, clearing local roadblocks to diffusion and leading to the Chinese tenure system's further deviation from the pre-1990s socialist "iron rice bowl" arrangement and the original U.S. model. Instrumental strategies, I argue, are the key theme throughout the process: the central state's top-down instrumental strategies "set in motion" the diffusion, and universities' instrumental strategies and faculty members' adaptations to these strategies "set free" the nationwide spread of the tenure system. The last empirical section introduces the new term "ideological neoliberal state" to address the question of why the tenure system diffused and illustrates the significance of the term with a contrast case.