Resettlement and the Reconfiguration of the Good Life: Home-Hometown Attachment among Ethnic Villages in Northwestern Yunnan, China

State-led resettlement has relocated millions, yet theories of resettlement inadequately grasp how it transforms the good life. Existing state-society frameworks reduce well-being to policy outputs or individual strategies, obscuring the relational fabric that renders rural existence meaningful. This article theorizes home-hometown attachment, a multidimensional bond tethering households to their socio-territorial world. Through a comparative analysis of four types of resettlement cases (geological disaster, ecological conservation, poverty alleviation, and infrastructure displacemen) in ethnic regions of northwestern Yunnan, we show that resettlement differentially disrupts attachment across socio-spatial, political-economic, symbolic-religious, and temporal-developmental dimensions. The findings indicate that, whether in the early, middle, or late stages of resettlement, or across different types of resettlement, peasants’ pursuit of the good life is consistently adjusted around the axis of Home–Hometown. The article advances resettlement studies by theorizing how spatial reconfiguration reshapes existence, and contributes to the sociology of well-being by grounding the good life in the relational worlds resettlement illuminates.