The specific question this chapter addresses is how to account ethnographically for change that unfolds on spatial and temporal scales larger than those of the ethnographic field study without opposing the local site to global forces. My research engages a processual approach which examines the effects of China’s transformations and the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone on the relationship between the members of a former emigrant community and their diaspora. I propose an analytical distinction between two relational dimensions of scale in which social action can be considered: scale as the scope of social systems or chains of interdependence that extend in space and time and in which actions and interactions take place, and scale as valence, i.e. the desirability of scale defined relative to other scales, generating ‘scalar projects’. I focus on how contradictions in the collected field materials are telling signs of accelerated change that generate conflicts of scale, and use such ‘diagnostic contradictions’ as a starting point for understanding how people attempt to make sense of rapid change and reconceptualize the valence of local and global scales.