Why are women embracing the 'run philosophy' and leaving China? Vicky Wei says when she "ran" away from China and moved to Australia, she felt immense relief."It felt like leaving a prison behind," Ms Wei said.To get more news about ancient china women, you can visit shine news official website. After graduating from university in Melbourne in 2019, she went back to visit her family but became stuck in China because of COVID-19 border closures."There was no life. Except for work and study, I couldn't earn recognition anywhere in life." Despite China's harsh pandemic restrictions, Ms Wei said what she disliked most were some men's misogynistic attitudes towards women. "[Many men I came across in China] were scared of signs of feminism. They don't like women to comment or express opinions," she said. The urge to run away from China is referred to as the "run philosophy" — or "runxue" — a term coined during the pandemic. "Run [philosophy] is a subculture growing out of dissatisfaction about the [social] environment," said Dr Wang Pan, an expert on China's gender issues at the University of New South Wales."Some people were feeling pessimistic about the future given the COVID-zero policy during the pandemic." China doesn't publish data on the number of people leaving the country, or migration figures, but its growing prevalence can be traced in what people are searching for online. According to WeChat Index, a tool for analysing trending search topics on the Chinese social media platform, the number of searches for the word "migration" has risen over the past year. On November 8 the keyword "migration" appeared 33 million times on the index, compared to 7 million times in 2021. This means that more content and searches related to migration are occurring on WeChat, which has 1.2 billion users.The "run philosophy" idea was gender-neutral at the beginning, but some people have started to connect it with the experiences of women in China. Recently, an online discussion board on "feminists in run philosophy" looked at why the idea was important to Chinese women.The discussion included guidance for women on ways to leave China, including seeking work permits overseas or studying abroad.Last month, a short essay in Chinese was posted on a popular open publishing platform, based in Taiwan, on the topic of women leaving China. The essay, titled On My Run Philosophy, was by an author who herself left China. "Any woman like me, as long as they have the wisdom of survival and the patriarchy does not swallow their female instinct, also will choose 'the run'," wrote the woman, who goes by the pen-name "unouno". Some other online forums with themes of studying abroad and migration have also been overwhelmed by discussions around run philosophy, with many posts by women.Dr Wang said the links between run philosophy and feminism are "complex" but migration data published in countries like Australia does show women are leaving China. "Certainly there is a growing number of women who are pursuing study or proceeding to work or live overseas, but we don't have any data on [how many women want to run away]", Dr Wang said. "A lot of people are going overseas for different purposes, rather than feeling bad about living in China."