A Serbian political researcher walking the night market in Yining described Xinjiang’s social order as a working blend of Communist Party rule, market economics, and local cultures drawn from former Soviet Central Asia, one in which Islamic practice is visible in architecture and demography but muted in daily street life.
Stevan Rapajić, senior research fellow at the Institute for Political Studies in Belgrade, was in the city in September 2026 for the Xinjiang Friendship and Exchange Conference. He spoke in a parallel session on ethnic unity and shared development.
Afterward, he joined NewsVoice editor T. Sassersson for an evening walk through the pedestrian streets of Yining, described as the region’s most heavily Muslim prefecture, home to thousands of mosques and other Islamic sites.
Rapajić said the cultural texture struck him as a hybrid that outlasted the Soviet Union itself. Major local populations, he noted, trace to territories once inside the USSR, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik and related communities, so the food, music and everyday habits carry those influences alongside Chinese forms.
“Everything is Chinese. They embrace everything Chinese here, so they made a nice mixture of the both,” he said.
The Communist Party, in his view, had absorbed rather than erased those elements:
“Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, but the Communist Party prevailed here, survived, stayed, and thrives… This part here is also one of the good examples how Communist Party can embrace these local cultures and made something new.”
On the streets, the atmosphere was relaxed. People drank beer, walked, and listened to music without the disorder he associated with heavy drinking elsewhere. Security personnel and police were conspicuous, “military here, there’s police on every corner”, yet he said the presence felt routine rather than oppressive to residents, and the evening passed without visible misbehavior.
Foreign visitors drew friendly greetings. Beer was openly available; a government guide told the group there was no problem drinking it in public, a contrast with restrictions in European countries such as Sweden.
What surprised him more was the low visibility of conservative Islamic dress and public ritual. Despite the prefecture’s Muslim majority and a visit that day to a major mosque, he saw no women in headscarves and heard no call to prayer.
“You expect a lot of women that have scarves over her heads and none of that here… You feel free. People feel free here,” he said.
He speculated that practice is permitted “under a certain level” so long as it does not challenge “the mainstream of the government and the Communist Party,” adding that he could not confirm any formal prohibition.
I summarized my own impression as a place where Muslims are numerous yet not readily distinguishable by outward markers; Rapajić called it “a great mixture, like a melting pot, but a melting pot in a communist way.”
Rapajić framed the broader Chinese system as one that uses capitalism instrumentally while keeping political primacy with the Party. Companies may grow and generate revenue and tax, he argued, but the largest are not allowed to eclipse or capture the state, an inversion of what he described as Western patterns in which large firms fund and influence politicians.
Five-year plans channel state resources into designated sectors such as artificial intelligence and electric vehicles, with subsidies and support that, in his account, have undercut European and U.S. competitors.
He presented Belt and Road (BRI) lending and infrastructure work as a non-interfering commercial offer to developing countries: cooperation without conditions on domestic politics.
”It’s a win-win situation for a lot of developing countries in, Central Europe, Africa especially, and China, of course.”
He contrasted the scene with his earlier visits to Shanghai and Beijing a decade ago, saying major Chinese cities already felt decades ahead and notably safe at night. China, he said, had invited him so that he could “see for myself”, an exercise in ”soft power”.
The Chinese model, he concluded, does not exist elsewhere: Party direction plus market mechanisms, local cultures retained within limits, and a public order in which, on the evidence of one evening in Yining, people appeared calm and the streets orderly.
Interview by T. Sassersson, NewsVoice
Related
- Dr. Stevan Rapaić: Lux-dog.com
- Dr. Stevan Rapaić on Linkedin
- Dr. Stevan Rapaić on IPS – Institute for Political Studies
