Media reports and scholarly studies of terrorism in contemporary China frequently focus on members of the largely Muslim Uyghur ethnic group, who are concentrated in the Northwestern province of Xinjiang. Throughout its history, the region now known as Xinjiang was ruled intermittently by China, while the local Uyghurs identify more closely with the cultures of Central Asia and had resisted attempts at assimilation to Han Chinese culture. From 1933 to 1934, Uyghurs founded a short-lived independent Islamic republic, and the Soviets supported Communist Uyghur rebels in the Ili Rebellion from 1944 to 1949 against the Republic of China, the Second East Turkestan Republic, before the Incorporation of Xinjiang into the People's Republic of China in 1949. After the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union amassed troops on the Russian border with Xinjiang, and bolstered "East Turkestan" separatist movements, which received moral and material support from other regional militant groups. China accused the Soviets of engineering riots, and improved the military infrastructure there to combat it.