Multi-directional migration patterns create new citizenship struggles, especially in nation-states (like China) that experience immigration, emigration and re-migration trends concurrently (henceforth contemporaneous migration). This presentation takes Chinese emigration as the starting point to consider how multidirectional migration flows have shaped and continue to shape both nation building in China and the way it projects itself globally. Contemporaneous migration generates new interethnic and co-ethnic tensions between past and present cohorts of migrants. China’s experience exemplifies how the territorial underpinnings and norms of citizenship are being reconfigured through the domestic and global events experienced by emigrants, immigrants, and re-migrants. Rather than approaching such migration trends as discrete fields of study, this presentation directs attention to the new insights that can be brought to migration and citizenship studies when we consider the temporal simultaneity of global events and the spatial connections that interlink migration sites.