By Rui Huang
润, romanised as Rùn, became a Chinese buzzword in 2022 and continues to be a hot topic among Chinese netizens in 2026.1 Adopting the English meaning of ‘running away’, this term refers to emigration from China.2 Five years later, its exact origin is hardly trackable on the internet, yet according to interviews with Douban users, the discussion of emigration – initially using the keyword pǎo lù 跑路 – began in 2020 on this online platform, alongside China’s lockdown policy during the COVID-19 pandemic.3 Due to repetitive censorship of keywords directly related to emigration, netizens eventually landed onRùn 润 as reference to continue their discussion on this topic. Following the 2022 Shanghai lockdown, a surge of online searches for emigration sparked international attention (Ni 2022; The Economist 2022).
Despite ongoing censorship, plans, stories and theorizations of this wave of emigration have been systematically archived and organized on open-accessed websites, presenting itself as an establishing field of study.4 It is therefore also referred to by netizens as ‘run-ology润学 (rùn xué,literally ‘the study of run’)’.
Rùnand Socio-Economic Backgrounds
The middle- and upper-middle-class socio-economic background of Rùn migrants is highlighted by the media. Reporters’ early coverage of Rùn spotlighted privileged groups who were capable of emigrating through legal means, such as university students, investors, or highly skilled migrants (本尼 2022; Cheng 2022; Huang 2022; 袁 2022). This demographic is reflected in dedicated discussion of Rùn on transnational Sinophone media popular among intellectuals and elites, such as podcasts (See 不明白播客) and independent news outlets (See 端传媒, 歪脑).5
However, public attention later shifted towards undocumented migrants – including small business owners – who are less privileged than aforementioned groups but significantly wealthier compared to previous generations of Chinese migrants, as well as other undocumented ethnic groups (吕 2023; Donnan 2023; 冯 2024). This phenomenon is called 走线 (literally ‘walk the line’) (Dong 2023; Yuan 2023) – a specific (sub)category under Rùn.
Discourses on Rùn
Partially overlapping with the demographic of intellectual elites, discussions of Rùn in 2022 primarily focus on the urban young population, and report that this younger generation treats Rùn as an alternative path towards a better future as opposed to both the competitive path of participating in nèi juǎn 内卷 (involution, in contrast to evolution, referring to destructive competition for fixed, limited resources), and the passive approach of tǎng píng 躺平 (lying flat, i.e., disengaging from societal competition for resources).7 Various journalistic and academic publications suggest that China’s political pressure and structural misogyny have contributed to the high proportion of female Rùn migrants (Zhang 2022a; Zhang 2022b; Plümmer 2023). Concern about a (potential) brain drain was prominent at the time (Plümmer 2023; Cheng 2022; Huang 2022).
In later coverage, direct complains against the Chinese state were presented in online articles (袁 2022; 鐘山 2023; Cheung and Zambrana 2024), attributing migration motives to strong political discontent. Attention to the increasing number of Chinese asylum seekers were reported (Peng 2024; Sullivan 2023; Wüst 2024). However, it remains doubtful whether Rùn could be considered an independent refugee migration wave (Plümmer, 2023). After Donald Trump’s second election, stories on struggles and eventual returns of Rùn migrants in the US received journalistic attention (Chen 2025; Yuan 2025), accompanying a growing interest in EU emigration (Hawkins 2024; 冯 and Cai 2025).
Interestingly, in two articles coining Rùn as keyword published by scholars working at mainland Chinese institutions, the influence of censorship surrounding the origin of Rùn, as well as the political discontent, were either completely left out (Chen and Han 2024), or brushed over in analysis (Li 2024). The above narrative conflicts with other discourses in Europe – taking the Netherlands for example, local-based scholars observe that ‘new’ Chinese migrants (discussed in relation to Rùn migrants in content) stand out from previous generations for being socially engaged and critical towards the Chinese state (Speelman 2025; NRC Vandaag 2025). Within the same year, CKN released a report on emerging ‘new’ (post-COVID-19) Chinese civil society organizations in the Netherlands and Europe (Luo et al. 2025).
Footnotes
1 Last accessed Feburary 2026, on bilibili.com, various videos about 润 were uploaded in late 2025/early 2026, more than one hundred thousand view accounts each on average.
2 ‘China’ in this article refers to the mainland of the People’s Republic of China.
3 Douban/豆瓣, a mainland Chinese online forum that is popular for discussion about books, movies, music, and other media content.
4 See GitHub-The-Run-Philosophy-Organization and Runba.com.
5 不明白博客 (The Weirdo) is an independent podcast channel, host by New Your Times journalist Yuan Li; See https://bumingbai.net/.
端传媒 (Initium Media) is an independent Sinohpnoe news media, founded in Hong Kong, now based in Singapore; See https://theinitium.com/.
歪脑 (WhyNot) is an independent Sinophone magazine, ran under the US government’s fund until March 2025; See https://www.wainao.me/.
6 Cited from GitHub, a screenshot of the claimed criteria for being qualified to join the Runology family.
7 For more about nèi juǎn内卷, could see (Qian and Bram 2024); for more about tǎng píng躺平, could see (Brossard 2022; Hsu 2022).
The bibliography can be found here.
Chinese Selfies in Europe 