Chapter 7 explores the dawn of China’s grand strategy to build regional order as well as the ends, ways, and means of this strategy. Using Party texts, it explores how the shock of the Global Financial Crisis led China to see the United States as weakening and emboldened it to take a more assertive course. It begins with a thorough review of China’s discourse on “multipolarity” and the “international balance of forces,” concepts China uses as euphemisms for US power and which it ties to its strategic guidelines. It then shows that the Party sought to lay the foundations for order—coercion, inducements, and legitimacy—under the auspices of the revised guidance “actively accomplish something” issued by Chinese leader Hu Jintao in 2009. This strategy, like blunting before it, was implemented across multiple instruments of statecraft—military, political, and economic.