A four-part series on a journey, mainly overland, across Europe, via Baku, for COP29, Tbilisi, for an honorary doctorate, and India, to visit the Tibetans in Dharamshala, before returning, entirely overland, via Moscow and Ukraine.The purpose of it all was to further the work of the de Borda Institute, campaigning for non-binary voting whenever resolving complex and/or contentious matters.
The most important word in Chinese is ‘tīngbudǒng.’ Used emphatically, it means, ‘I hear what you’re saying, but don’t understand a bloody thing.’ Out in the countryside; I arrived at a little village and met an old boy (who probably thought I deserved the same adjective), and said, ‘Nǐ hǎo,’ the Chinese hello. He stopped, looked me up and down, and then replied, “Tīngbudǒng.”
Chinese is non-alphabetical, I was told at a night class in Queen’s. And there are four tones, like mā, má, mǎ, mà, plus a neutral ma. So Běijīng 北京means northern capital, but with different tones, as in bèijǐng, it means ‘background.’ And life can be tricky: ‘I love you mā’ 妈means ‘I love you mummy’; but ‘mǎ’ 马means ‘horse,’ while ‘ma’ 吗makes it, ‘I love you mum, or maybe I don’t.’ (Accordingly, in this article, I try to use tones.)
I started in the south-western province of Yúnnán, in February, 2025. The mornings were sometimes quite cold, and in one little hamlet, a few folk were huddled round an open fire, so again, I bid welcome. Alas, they just waved me away… and pretending such a wave was a western form of welcome didn’t help. I was, I suppose, a very strange stranger, and maybe their first foreign visitor.
In the next larger settlement, a local granny was 70; umpteen folk were in the only shop, preparing for (or chatting about) her birthday-party lunch. Now in many countries, the foreigner is first asked, “Where are you from?” Not in China; not with me anyway; an old boy, speaks (well, some) Chinese; on a bicycle. “How old are you?” 82. “Have a cup o’ tea.” Thanks. “Have another.”
I was researching local politics. China, of course, is a one-party state, but no matter what the regime, every community still has to make local decisions. China’s Academy of Social Sciences was due to hold its fourth ‘International Forum for Democracy,’ and I’d already participated in its first Forum, in 2021, on-line. For their March 2025 event, I decided to go to China in January, to see what the craic was in the rural areas, and then go to Beijing for the Forum.
So after another cup of tea, I cycled off to meet the village deputy chair, before then returning for granny’s birthday lunch! Every village of a few thousand residents has a chair, a party member who is usually elected; the electoral system is sometimes approval voting, where you ‘tick’ just one or as many candidates as you like, and sometimes the ‘British’ first-past-the-post system, (invented in Rome in the year 105).
In Yúnnán, where the three mighty rivers, the Salween, Mekong and Yangste, run parallel to each other amidst mountains of up to 5,000 metres, cycling was hard work. By chance, I met another cyclist, a younger feller; like my Chinese, his English was not very good, but we teamed up. It was getting late; I could have pitched tent but we found what is most unusual in China: a lonely farmhouse. Welcome.
She prepared a meal, rice of course, meat (almost of course) and lots of different veg., all fried in a great mix. He produced the booze: báijiǔ, the local ‘vodka’ usually made from sorghum at about 50%. And the three of us chatted: I would say something in my Chinese; my cyclist friend would translate this into proper Chinese; and, ‘Ah, I see,’ the farmer then understood. Have another báijiǔ.
On the morrow, we returned to the road; my cyclist friend and I parted – he was soon lost from sight – and I carried on, rather more slowly. Eventually, the road descended, and on a little Brompton with its tiny wheels, the cyclist has to be very careful! I got down, paused… and fell asleep. But not for long. I paused again to ask for directions, and was given a meal. On stopping in town, where I stayed in a B-and-no-B, I checked my emails, and the fourth Forum was still not called. This was all rather enjoyable, so I just carried on.
After a train to Guǎngdōng and Guǎngxī, I took a bus to a small town in the countryside, dumped all my luggage in a hotel, and on each of the next three days, cycled out into the countryside to visit a few more villages. Now there are lots of minorities in China. Yúnnán, for example, has a large Tibetan community, and Guǎngxī is home to the largest, the Zhuàng, a minority of 19 million! Some villages in China, especially in the eastern provinces, are nearly all Hàn – there are over a billion of those folks; some villages are mixed, and in one in Xīnjiāng, there were seven different ethnic groups; interestingly, they were using, well, a form of proportional representation PR, electing two of these, one of those… in all, a total of eleven, and the chair was a Huí, a Moslem minority.
Back in Guǎngxī, one village was entirely Zhuàng. In many conversations, mobile phones gave instant translations. We were talking about decision-making, and villages sometimes held open public meetings in a local hall. So, I asked, how does a debate come to a definite conclusion? He replied. May I have a look at that, I asked. So he gave me his mobile, and there it was: 少数 服从 多数, as they say, shǎoshù fúcóng duōshù, the minority obeys the majority.
Ha! This was why I was in China. Just like us, just like almost everybody on this planet, China also believes in majority rule. But the world argues as if we are different. Furthermore, China was using majority voting, over 2,000 years ago, albeit only in the Imperial Court.
Secondly – and for me, this is amazing – according to the Cambridge History of China, the Jīn Dynasty held a multi-option vote… in 1197! It was in a debate on the then enemy, Mongolia, and there were three options: war:an-alternating-policy:peace; they voted 5:33:46; so peace it was… until Chinggis Khan came along, in 1206.
As winter changed into spring and then summer, there was still no word about the Forum in Běijīng – indeed, I now think it will not happen at all – so I went to Tiānjīn, visiting a professor I’d first met in 2013, a rest from the bicycle, to teach again in his university. From there, I went to the first of three ‘sensitive areas’, Inner Mongolia.
As luck would have it – the kindness of strangers – a local took me out of town to a little settlement, where many Mongolians regard themselves as being different, with a different language and culture. China thinks Mongolia is part of China; but the grandson of Chinggis Khan, conquered all of China, so maybe it’s the other way round.
Xīnjiāng is another ‘sensitive’ complexity, given that the native population, the Dzungars, were exterminated in the 1750s’ genocide; that Xīnjiāng is now home to quite a few minorities; and that about 1,300 years ago, the Uighurs, originally from somewhere in Mongolia, were fighting their western neighbours with the Chinese.
A foreigner visiting Tibet, the most sensitive of all, needs a travel agency to get a special permit and arrange the trains, hotels, and so on. On going to the station in Beijing, I thought everything was in order. Ten minutes before departure, all the passengers went down to the platform. Ah, there’s my wagon. Oh, the police. Passport? Yes, that was ok. Permit. They then said, “You are not to go to Tibet.” “Wèishénme? Why,” I shouted! Five minutes to go. I rang the travel agency. Alright, you can go to Xīníng, the capital of Qīnghǎi, the next-door province, but not to Tibet. I got onboard.
And so, July 2025, in Lhasa, where in the 14th century, the Buddhist monk Longchenpa spoke of “the non-duality of right and wrong.” I’m taken to the hotel, with my Brompton. The Chinese manager said, “Come and have a beer.” He had recently cycled from Kathmandu to Lhasa, a distance of some 1,400 kilometres. “Shall we go cycling together in Tibet?”
Next week: Part II – Putin’s War. Peter crosses the Caucasus into Russia, lectures against the war in Moscow, and then goes on to wartime Mykolaiv and Kyiv. He also asks what Crimea and Bosnia might teach Northern Ireland about its border poll.
Peter Emerson, the child of an English Catholic mum and Irish Protestant dad, was conceived in Belfast (as far as he recalls) but/and born in England. So – Ne Temere and all that – he was raised a Catholic. First in submarines, he sank to the rank of first lieutenant, but resigned to teach maths and physics in Kenya. Next, Belfast in 1975, he was a community worker in Ardoyne and then an activist in the peace movement and CND. “Are you ’this’ or ’that’?” they asked, in both conflicts, so he learnt Russian and got a job in Moscow.
But first, in 1986, he helped John Robb’s New Ireland Group run an experiment in consensus, with SF, the UDA – all but the DUP – using non-binary voting. It worked. Back in Belfast in ’91, we did another, with a guest from Sarajevo: Bosnia, too, was to suffer a binary conflict. Does everyone use binary voting? He’s just been to China; it seems the answer is yes.
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