Abstract: The scale of migration of rural population has been a big increase since the reform of China,and the spatial migration distribution has a great change as well.By use of software of ARCGIS and based on the data of the forth and fifth censuses,the paper studies the spatial and temporal change of rural population migration and summarizes the characteristics of migration of rural population in the last 20 years.Firstly,the authors analyse the share changes of the rural population migration to the whole country population migration in the 1980s and 1990s,and divides 31 provinces into four classes according to the average of share of rural population migration to whole population migration further and briefly explores the reasons of change with the time for every province.Then they explore the spatial and temporal changes of rural population migration from the inter-provincial and inner-provincial scales.The scale and flow direction of in-migration and out-migration of rural population are explored in this paper.At last,the authors make a comparison research of activity degree of rural population migration among provinces by use of migration rate.The conclusion are as follows: ① From the viewpoint of whole China,the scale of migration of rural population is increasing,but the percentage to total migration is decreasing for the urban population migration.② Although the rural population take the great parts in whole in China,but it varies in different provinces.The urban population migration plays an important role in some developed provinces.It is found that the rural population both of Middle China and West China are more active in 1990s than in the 1980s not only for inter-provincial migration but also for inner-provincial migration.③ The distance of migration is longer and the direction of migration is clearer in the 1990s than in the 1980s.The rural migrants mainly rushed to the regions of Guangdong,Shanghai,Jiangsu and Zhejiang and mainly came from Anhui,Hunan,Jiangxi,Henan and Sichuan.④ Although it appears that the Middle China and East China are the same level as far as the total scale of migration,the migration structures are different.The migration of East China mainly take place in inner province,while that of Middle China mainly do inter provinces.⑤ Both inner-provincial and inter-provincial migration rate have rises from the 1980s to the 1990s and the rise range is different in provinces for location,history,economy and so on.The province with maximum rural migration is not the province with highest migration rate because of the different rural population base.