When they came to Central Asia, the Dungans were mostly illiterate peasants from northwest China who spoke a series of topolects from Shaanxi, Gansu, and other areas. From 1927 to 1928, they wrote their language with the Arabic alphabet, and from 1928-1932 they used the Latin alphabet. In 1952-53, the Soviet government created for the Dungans a writing system based on the Cyrillic alphabet, which they continue to use till today.
Right now I'm super into investigating alternatives to hanzi that places have created, like this for example (though they didn't move away from hanzi), and then Japan creating hiragana/katakana, Korea creating Hangul, various romanization movements etc etc, even looking at simplified characters. It's largely all about politics and power but also the idea of written language mimicking spoken language (very unlike classical Chinese) and increased literacy. So many things going on!