THIS book explores how labor migration is changing rural China and proceeds by examining the interactions among values, goals, resources, and social actors. Values are the meanings that people ascribe to attributes and actions. They are expressed in the norms and rules governing appropriate behavior in society, and they inform both goals and acceptable pathways to those goals. Goals are the things that people want to do, become, own, or feel; they are achieved by obtaining and deploying resources. Resources include both material resources (e.g., cash and commodities) and abstract resources such as contacts, information, and prestige. All these resources are distributed according to culturally embedded rules stipulating which people are entitled to what quantities of which resources under what conditions. Social actors are individuals or collective entities such as households. These actors usually attempt to deploy resources in ways that enable them to obtain more resources for attaining further goals. They are generally knowledgeable about society's values and distributional structures and reconstitute them as they use this knowledge to form and attain goals. This means that each social actor continually stimulates interaction among values, goals, and resources. These interactions contribute to changes in the values and resources available within society to inform further goals, changes that both enable and constrain subsequent actions. Migration and return migration are strategies pursued by social actors for attaining goals; they involve the use and reproduction of particular values and mechanisms of resource distribution.