Talk of "run" started to go viral in China during the restrictions of the zero-COVID policy, even as a growing number of people started actually "running" in real life. Large numbers of people managed to get out of China by various means, which surprised everyone. Were the good times really over? After several decades of breakneck economic growth following Deng-era reforms and opening up to the outside world, China had become the world's fastest-growing economy, poised to narrow the gap with developed countries when it came to urban living standards. During that time, a lot of highly qualified Chinese people decided that there were better opportunities on offer at home. According to official propaganda, China has been strengthened by the leadership of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and its leaders, to the point where everyone knows that to live in China is to enjoy the good life. What possible need could there be to cut and run to a cut-throat capitalist country? The true story lies in the data, however. Figures from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees show that more than 100,000 Chinese nationals sought political asylum annually from 2019-2022, far higher than under former president Hu Jintao. This comparison alone is enough to puncture any illusion of a "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" under supreme party leader Xi Jinping's "new era." The harshly enforced lockdowns, quarantine camps, and mass compulsory testing of the zero-COVID policy in particular led people to despair over the unscientific, arbitrary, and authoritarian controls under Xi. Individuals in totalitarian societies are often isolated, with limited and costly options for resistance, with escape often the only rational choice left. Make no mistake: The "run" movement is a response to a political problem. More and more people have sought me out in recent years for advice on whether to leave China, and about how best to do it. They come from disparate professional backgrounds, including bosses of small and medium-sized companies, assembly-line workers from huge technology companies, journalists and editors, university professors and students, and rural migrant workers. Their reasons for wanting to leave and the methods they use to get out vary, but they all share a common motivation: They no longer feel secure living in today's China, and worry about where the country is going. Leaving gives them some temporary respite from their sense of impending doom, whether that stems from fears for their personal safety, their assets, or their children's future. Probing the reasons for these feelings of insecurity leads inevitably to political satire, because the thing that terrifies people more than anything is the overreaching power wielded by the so-called "people's" leaders. There's a line in the 1994 sitcom "I Love My Family" that sums it up: "One mistake from your granddad makes a beggar out of mine." Make no mistake: the "run" movement is a response to a political problem. I went to study overseas in 2014, and first considered whether to "run" at the end of 2015, after police in the southern province of Guangdong raided a number of labor NGOs, arresting more than 20 activists, in a bid to clamp down on the rising number of worker protests at factories in the Pearl River Delta. I knew the NGO activists who were arrested through my research into labor issues in the Pearl River Delta, and my friends at home and abroad who were in touch with what was going on warned me not to go back to China, out of fear for my personal safety. Some of my American friends came up with various ideas for how I could stay in the U.S.. I seriously considered leaving China for good, but eventually concluded that there was still some room to work for social change if I steered clear of the most politically sensitive issues, even though civil society was really struggling amid the tougher political environment. So I returned to China after the dust had settled from the labor crackdown, and continued to do fieldwork on labor issues. Looking back on my reasoning, it's hard to say whether it was right or wrong. The Chinese system, where political change can stem from the ideas of a single person, is highly unpredictable. Back in 2016, I once heard a well-known political scholar in Beijing quip, "Who would have thought that things would be this way in the run-up to the 18th Party Congress?" For the younger generation, who had yet to experience a political catastrophe like those in China's recent past, and who have gotten accustomed to economic growth and relative openness, life in China seems to have grown stranger and stranger over the past decade. Political totalitarianism, economic stagnation, the defeat of social movements and cultural conservatism raised their heads, through a number of extreme events. People have felt the effects of this across every social class, with the middle classes experiencing constant anxiety, and farmers and workers seeing obstacles and crises all around. Manufacturing workers and construction workers from rural areas have been greatly affected by the zero-COVID policy, forced into taking minimum wage jobs or being laid off amid financial constraints that include declining government investment in infrastructure and falling real estate prices. But the paranoia of those in power means that they are only willing to hear a single narrative, cocooned as they are in their bureaucracy, dreaming of a bright future and the rejuvenation of China as a world power. The ever-widening powers wielded by the machinery of the state are frightening, with propaganda departments going full steam ahead to inject the population with positive energy. But the fact is that more and more people are being squeezed or damaged by ever-widening structural problems, and are increasingly waking up to the harsh realization that they can do nothing to change the huge uncertainties faced by China. All they can do is try to change their own lives. Why is the "run" movement so appealing? Young people were shaken up by the authorities' response to COVID-19. The pandemic was a massive accelerator. The constant lockdowns of the zero-COVID era sharpened many people’s impulse to escape, with huge crowds seen escaping cities and factories amid rumors of imminent restrictions. City residents would drive through the night to escape impending lockdowns, only to find themselves gridlocked trying to get onto an expressway. Workers at technology companies hurriedly carried their computers home; migrant workers in urban villages broke through barriers around their dormitories and workshops. Most shocking were the scenes at Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory, where workers were seen climbing fences to escape restrictions, then walking hundreds of kilometers back to their hometowns. These events sparked fear, helplessness and anger, as well as a desire for greater freedom and autonomy, which is part of human nature. China's zero-COVID policy was a classic example of totalitarian control, with each individual subject to a strict system of rigid stability maintenance and digital monitoring. Even after the government announced the end of the policy, the extreme forms of control still linger, casting a shadow over people's lives in many different ways. In Guangdong, authorities claimed to have deleted people's personal data with the abandonment of the Health Code COVID-19 tracker app, only to relaunch another mandatory app that monitors household registrations, local residents, migrants, and foreign nationals, and that continues to collect people's data. Seen in this way, the zero-COVID policy was a template for China's broader move toward greater social control and restriction generally. There was no going back to the old days of pre-pandemic "normal." The "run" movement grew into a viral meme on social media platforms, and found the greatest resonance with younger people, who faced bleak economic prospects and a number of other dilemmas. Neither the international nor the domestic environment that underpinned China's rapid economic growth over the past three decades exists any more. Ever-tighter political controls and profound structural inequality are making it no longer sustainable to distribute the benefits of economic growth to more vulnerable groups. Economic growth was no longer following Pareto efficiency, with people instead forced to compete ever more fiercely for smaller pieces of a pie that they couldn't make any bigger. From cradle to grave, everything was getting harder to access, from prestigious universities, to major companies, to the civil service. I think young people today understand this very well. And government restrictions on individual freedoms make it hard to find ways to relieve stress when even the pleasures of TV dramas and celebrity news are often undermined by strict censorship. According to professor Qin Hui of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China's development model since 1979 has relied on the "human rights advantage" conferred by low levels of freedom and social welfare on offer to the general population. Our parents, especially those who were migrant workers, were the drivers of this comparative advantage. Diligent, cheap and obedient, they expended a lifetime of blood and sweat to create this country's economic miracle. But they haven't had a fair share of the rewards of that growth. Now in old age, they have been left to fend for themselves with no pensions or access to medical care. Some people managed to hop aboard the economic express train and join the middle class, preventing their children from experiencing deprivation. But the lack of corresponding political reforms means that there has been little improvement in the way the state wields power, or to structural injustices imposed by the state on the people, meaning that ordinary people who lack protection of their rights could suffer great misfortune at any time. Tragically, future generations are going to go through a number of crises including the emerging financial crisis, declining birth rates and an aging population, later retirement, and gaps in social security provisions, carrying the burdens of the entire country. This is why the “run” movement has emerged as an alternative to people just accepting their fate as passive cogs in the state machine, exploited for their energy and economic potential. Harsh and formidable obstacles lie ahead for those who choose to "run." Leaving China also offers a way of potentially turning lives around. In 2015, in California, I met a young woman from Shanghai who was running her own small business. She originally came to the United States to visit family and travel. One day, during a skydiving trip, she experienced an overwhelming feeling of freedom, and decided to stay. She enrolled in community college to learn English from scratch, worked bit by bit to overcome a series of obstacles, and put down roots in the Bay Area. During the pandemic, she volunteered as a healthcare worker providing services for Chinese immigrants. Her life has changed since then, and she can now live according to her own interests and wishes. She has found love, and has generally been very happy for the past few years. I have heard some marvelous tales in New York's Chinatown from people who decided to "run," including from some who paid huge sums of money to smugglers to enter the United States via Mexico. Others entered the country on tourist visas, then tore up their Chinese passports after getting off the plane. All of these stories made me realize that the precondition for any kind of success is to decide what you want and have the persistence to see it through. Of course, this process doesn't happen overnight. Human beings are social animals. Uprooting and transplanting yourself to a completely new environment doesn't come easily to us. Running away isn't just about getting a visa, buying a plane ticket, and leaving the country of your birth. It's also about getting established and making a living in a foreign country. In the United States, recent immigrants can face a wait of up to more than 10 years to get their green card or permanent residency. A Chinese student who comes to the United States and wants to stay after graduation needs to overcome many obstacles, from finding an employer willing to provide visa sponsorship and applying for a work visa, to renewing the work visa, to applying for permanent residency. Unforeseen events like being fired halfway through that process can jeopardize their status at any time. And finding a way to make a living is only the start. It takes much longer to put down cultural and psychological roots. Some will eventually get the life they wanted, while others will barely survive. In San Francisco's Chinatown, I've run into a number of people who still don't speak English after more than a decade in the United States, and whose lives are spent entirely within those Chinese communities. This doesn't mean they have failed at settling in the U.S., but it's clear that a large number of Chinese immigrants find it hard to enter mainstream society and expand their lives and their career prospects. For these people, possibilities remain severely limited. One man spent tens of thousands of dollars to get to the U.S., and wound up going back to China after only eight or nine months because he couldn't adapt to life in the country. Differences in language, culture, and daily life vary hugely even within China, with huge variations between north, south, east, and west. On top of this, attitudes towards migrants vary hugely from country to country. Chinese people often lack first-hand experience before they "run," relying instead on other people's stories and descriptions, which tend to downplay any problems they might encounter. Once they arrive, they are forced to go through a lengthy and arduous immigration process. For many, this is just a new kind of unfreedom. They may wind up having to do work they don't like or marrying someone they don't like for the sake of legal status. They may be forced to live in places they don't like, and spend vast amounts of time, money and energy dealing with immigration lawyers and agencies and exhausting paperwork. Others may find they can't change jobs because their visa is sponsored by their employer, or be forced to put up with low-wage, tedious and even exploitative work for years on end. All of this can bring fresh physical and psychological woes. Class differences also affect what life is like for those who "run." Middle class individuals who are able to emigrate through investment visas or by buying a house may have more resources at their disposal, but they still face downgrading in terms of their jobs and social status that comes with immigration, and may feel the difference more keenly than a working class person who is smuggled in and does menial work when they arrive, often for higher wages than they would have gotten in China. Such people have more realistic expectations of their new lives, and often adapt better psychologically. A middle-aged woman in San Francisco who had formerly worked as an accountant at a well-known newspaper in Guangzhou, a very decent job with a good standard of living, told me that she could only get work as a domestic helper in the United States after moving there with her family. This change in prospects was stark, and she earned much less than before. High-end jobs in developed countries are often highly competitive, in a labor market that is often saturated with qualified applicants. There is the language barrier, as well as a lack of local knowledge, network, social capital and other resources, all of which make it very hard for immigrants, especially recent ones, to compete with the local population. What's more, getting more people to fill minimum-wage jobs is often a key motivation behind immigration policies in developed countries. Some provincial projects in Canada have listed a wide range of blue-collar jobs in their list of "shortage occupations," in a bid to get immigration to serve the needs of the minimum-wage labor market. All of this means that a lot of people will migrate to developed countries only to find themselves moving from white-collar to blue-collar jobs, or from highly-skilled work to unskilled labor. With years of higher education and professional experience in their home countries rendered pointless, they are forced to reevaluate the meaning of work in their lives. This requires considerable mental preparation. So why do so many people continue to "run?’ Multinational experience and histories have shown us that while first generation immigrants may have it tough, their children will likely grow up in a better environment. Many middle class people who give up an established family business and move to another country halfway through their lives are driven by the desire for their kids to get a better education or to have them grow up in a more just and inclusive environment. This is especially important for those subject to political oppression. Dissidents, human rights lawyers, women's rights activists, and labor activists have been targeted for persecution over the past decade in China, affecting both their own personal freedom and that of their families, some of whom are harassed and punished for merely being associated with them. Judicial appeals are futile as the crackdown intensifies. The iron fist of socialism could fall on anyone at any time. Just bitching about something online could spark a visit by unidentified goons asking to "read the water meter." During the Shanghai lockdown, an enforcer dressed head to toe in white PPE threatened a resident who refused to go to a quarantine camp with the words, "This could affect your family for the next three generations." To which the man retorted desperately, "I am the last of my line." The exchange triggered the fears of many, and the young man's reply was taken up by countless others on social media. For many who lived through the nightmare of a lockdown in China, leaving offers the prospect of a more normal life both for themselves and for future generations. This responsibility weighs heavily on the shoulders of those who feel unsafe under their government. The choice to withdraw completely from an unjust system is also a form of rebellion. It's unfair to call it something negative, like "escaping," given the huge costs involved. As the "run" movement broadens into a collective form of voting with one's feet, it's hard to say whether it will give China's totalitarian leadership pause. But it is still worthy of respect as a courageous bid to take control of one's own destiny, and as a movement that is driven by the natural human desire for justice, freedom and security. A much bigger challenge is the rebuilding of personal values and shared sense of community in a new location. Immigrants face adaptive challenges stemming from different ideological concepts and institutional policies. It's often very hard for the first generation of immigrants to adapt from an authoritarian regime to a relatively free society, and to accept and integrate into the new value system. People who emigrate for political reasons are in the minority in the Chinese diaspora. There are still pro-Beijing trolls, little pink nationalists, and populists to reckon with even outside the Great Firewall. Perceptions, ideas, and political opinions vary widely even within the same ethnic group, when an immigrant's sense of national identity has been left behind in China. A lack of information generated by the overseas Chinese community means that the Chinese diaspora still rely heavily on Chinese sources of information, including Weibo, WeChat, Douban, and Xiaohongshu. These platforms remain subject to censorship, meaning that the influence of China's authoritarian politics extends overseas. As China and the West enter an atmosphere some observers see as akin to a new Cold War, international students' speech and activism will be monitored by Chinese embassies, Communist Party-backed student unions on overseas campuses, and even their own classmates, unbeknownst to them. Internet police in China continue to monitor dissidents' social media accounts outside the Great Firewall, and harass their families back home. Some political activities in the Chinese community encounter interference from pro-Beijing groups. So you can take a person out of China, but you can't always remove them from China's influence. In recent years, several online celebrity nationalists have been ridiculed for setting up anti-American live stream broadcasts while living in the United States with their families. They are well aware of China's current political climate and its likely future direction, yet choose to act as propaganda accomplices. Such people see leaving China as a kind of speculation, and it's a win-win situation. China allows them their domestic platform, while they also run rampant through the overseas Chinese community, erasing the diversity of diaspora voices. But there are also promising developments. In recent years, well-educated younger people trained in liberal arts have begun to get more political, participating more and more in public events. They are also developing their own sense of identity when it comes to putting down roots overseas. This younger, pan-liberal community is able to integrate into social movements in their host country, including trade unionism, the Black Lives Matter and critical race theory movements, and the movement countering anti-Asian racism in the United States. At the same time, the community keeps track of what's happening in China, and uses its relative freedom to speak out and spread various progressive ideas online. Many were able to organize and take part in community activities during the #MeToo movement, the Liu Qiangdong rape case, the Bridge Man protest, and the "white paper" movement, to hugely beneficial and positive effect. It reminds me of my own involvement in the $15 minimum wage campaign in California, the San Francisco city elections, and the Bernie Sanders Democratic Party primary campaign. For the younger generation of activists, China’s issues aren't just what made them run: they are what make them stay. Now that they have physical freedom, they are regaining the space and drive to focus on and intervene in China's domestic affairs. It may not be so easy to get out from under China's influence, but they're not prepared to give up on China's issues either. This younger generation of immigrants maintains close ties with China, in spite of ever-harsher censorship behind the Great Firewall, which means they are able to bring the influence of overseas progressive communities back home. Running, then, doesn't mark the end of the problem, but the start of new ways of dealing with it. It's a complex process of reinvention that works from the bottom up, requiring new immigrants to deal with their own basic need for survival alongside the formation of new values and community identities. While the "run" movement can be seen as a fairly passive form of rebellion against a totalitarian regime, it also hints at new possibilities for social activism in an emerging progressive community. To "run" is to live constantly in a liminal and often contested space, looking for coordinates in the new country while keeping an eye on what's happening back home. Those who do it need to prepare themselves for life in this divided reality. If China fails to follow the path of greater political openness and freedom, the "run" movement will continue, and people will keep leaving, both physically and mentally, sustaining this act of rebellion. And eventually, someone in this movement will find a way to fight back. The "run" movement has already sowed the seeds of a non-cooperation movement overseas, so the saying that the "overseas Chinese are the mother of the revolution" may one day come back to haunt Beijing. Translated by Luisetta Mudie (Opinions and commentaries published by WhyNot represent the sole view of the author, and aren't representative of the views of this website)