This paper explores school principals' use of human resource management (HRM) strategies and their influence on teachers' professional learning communities in X Rural District in China's Shanghai. Semi-structured interviews with 16 school and kindergarten heads showed that school-level contextual factors accounted for school principals' use of HRM strategies to create structural and relational conditions for school-level professional learning communities (PLCs), provincial-level factors pushed school principals to use HRM strategies to develop open teacher PLC structures and collaborative relations, and principal-level factors influenced principals' use of HRM strategies to create cultural and relational conditions for teachers' professional learning. This article presents a 'context-HRM-teacher learning' model for understanding principals' human resource management influence on teachers' professional learning in rural China.