Rùn (meme)
Internet slang for emigration from China
Rùn (Chinese: 润; pinyin: rùn; IPA: [ɻwən˥˩]) is a Chinese internet meme that expresses the desire to escape one's current country of residence. Originally meaning "profitable" or "to moisten", the word gained its additional meaning because its romanization resembles the English word "run". It saw a spike in usage due to China's stringent COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2022, which prompted many Chinese citizens to consider emigrating from China.
Rùn has a derivative term: runology or runxue (Chinese: 润学; pinyin: rùn xué), meaning "the study of running away".
Background
Chinese youths have experienced worsening economic prospects and diminishing political freedoms. Besides tang ping, refusing to overwork and leading a laid-back lifestyle, and neijuan, overworking only to achieve marginal gain, a third response is to emigrate from China. This response is termed rùn.
The term started as a means to circumvent censorship and was popular only among minority groups who desire to escape to a country more friendly to them. However, during the 2022 COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai, the word rùn gained prominence due to stringent lockdown rules and governmental crackdown on personal freedoms. Internet searches for immigration-related inquiries spiked on the first week of 28 March, when Shanghai started its lockdowns.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Rùn (meme)” as internet slang for emigration from China. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as internet slang for emigration from China. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q115188168. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rùn (meme)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.