This article examines the multilingual and multimodal practices of British Chinese children in complementary school classes from a multicompetence perspective. Using classroom interaction data from a number of Chinese complementary schools in 3 different cities in England, the article argues that the multicompetence perspective enables a holistic look at codeswitching and modeswitching by multilingual children of minority ethnic background and helps to highlight creativity and criticality--2 important and closely related concepts that have hitherto been underexplored in multilingualism research.