Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Rùn emerged during COVID lockdowns as a coded idiom of (e)migration among young Chinese urbanites. Using a patchwork ethnography, this study reads rùn as a symbolic and affective language of movement, futurity, and aspiration, negotiated across different sociocultural infrastructures of migration.

Paper long abstract

Rùn emerged during the heightened COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai as a coded idiom of (e)migration among Chinese young urbanites. Existing scholarship has predominantly interpreted rùn as an expression of pandemic-driven disillusionment with an authoritarian regime of under-mobility, caged freedom, and frustrated future-making. While it captures the political context, reading rùn solely through the state governance minimises deeper sociocultural complexities that foreground movement as both being and becoming. Rather than treating rùn as a Chinese peculiarity, this study situates it within broader post-Cold War social imaginaries across the Global East, where tensions between staying and leaving intersect with an uncertain futurity. Drawing on a patchwork ethnography of netnographic participation and in-person interviews in Shanghai, the study re-examines why rùn emerged and persisted as a coded term among young Chinese urbanites and examines how they negotiate and inhabit its meanings in everyday life. It operationalises rùn as a complex symbolic and moral structure rather than as a one-time act of departure. Seeing rùn as a lived language across chronotopes unsettles ‘migration’ as a singular analytical unit of movement that semantically obscures many culturally embedded elements of movement in everyday experience. Its symbolic richness indicates how a cluster of ideas about freedom, kinship, future, and aspirational imaginaries interacts with one another. In doing so, the study speaks to different sociocultural infrastructures of migration that constitute various enabling and constraining forces shaping people’s migration intentions and their actual ‘doings’ of migration, offering new insights into debates on (im)mobility, moral aspiration, and futurity.