Person re-identification (reid) plays an important role in surveillance video analysis, especially for criminal investigation and intelligent security. Although a large number of effective feature or distance metric learning approaches have been proposed, it still suffers from pedestrians appearance variations caused by pose changing. Most of the previous methods address this problem by learning a pose-invariant descriptor subspace. In this paper, we propose a pose variation adaptation method for person reid in the view of data augmentation. It can reduce the probability of deep learning network over-fitting. Specifically, we introduce a pose transfer generative adversarial network with a similarity measurement constraint. With the learned pose transfer model, training images can be pose-transferred to any given poses, and along with the original images, form a augmented training dataset. It increases data diversity against over-fitting. In contrast to previous GAN-based methods, we consider the influence of pose variations on similarity measure to generate more realistic and shaper samples for person reid. Besides, we optimize hard example mining to introduce a novel manner of samples (pose-transferred images) used with the learned pose transfer model. It focuses on the inferior samples which are caused by pose variations to increase the number of effective hard examples for learning discriminative features and improve the generalization ability. We extensively conduct comparative evaluations to demonstrate the advantages and superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches on Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, the rank-1 accuracy is 96.1% for Market-1501 and 92.0% for DukeMTMC-reID.