Using five Chinese villages as the research material, this study provides first hand information about rural-urban and rural-rural migration in China after 1980. It aims to compare the results of the survey with two other theories on the nature of rural-urban migration. The model built up is multi-disciplinary, based on documentary research in the disciplines of sociology/anthropology and development economics. The particular focus and critique concerns two sociological theories illustrated by Revanstein and Leww, and two economic models inferred by Lewis and Todaro which have been widely quoted in the literature of migration.