Revolution and state formation as oasis storytelling in Xinjiang

o-one can say the world is ignoring Xinjiang. In October 2019, at the American Association of Christian Counsellors, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo likened China's treatment of more than a million Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to George Orwell's 1984 (Reuters 2019). This was while the Trump White House began placing sanctions on Chinese governmental and business organisations involved with the now infamous reeducation camps in the region. In June 2020, Pompeo went further to condemn alleged mass sterilisations and, the following month, the US Departments of State, Commerce, and Homeland Security issued a joint 'Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory' targeted at forced labour in the province (South China Morning Post 2020; US State Department 2020). China has been condemned by representatives from more than 20 countries, with the notable exception of Muslim-majority states that have important trading relationships with Beijing such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Iraq (AFP 2019; Shams 2019; Kerimkhanov 2019; Liu 2019; Calabrese 2019).