People's Liberation Army Navy |
People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is the naval arm of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the military of the People's Republic of China. Until the early 1990s, the navy performed a subordinate role to
the PLA land forces. The strategy of the PLAN was a combination of Maoist guerrilla warfare and the Soviet young officers
school.
PLAN destroyer Harbin
History
In 1949 Mao Zedong asserted that "to oppose imperialist aggression, we must
build a powerful navy." The Naval Academy was set up at Dalian in March 1950, mostly
with Soviet instructors. The Navy was established in September 1950 by consolidating
regional naval forces under General Staff Department command. It then consisted of a motley collection of ships and boats
acquired from the Guomindang forces. The Naval Air Force was added two years later. By 1954 an estimated 2,500 Soviet naval
advisers were in China--possibly one adviser to every thirty Chinese naval personnel--and the Soviet Union began providing modern
ships. With Soviet assistance, the navy reorganized in 1954 and 1955 into the North Sea Fleet, East Sea Fleet, and South Sea
Fleet, and a corps of admirals and other naval officers was established from the ranks of the ground forces. In shipbuilding the
Soviets first assisted the Chinese, then the Chinese copied Soviet designs without assistance, and finally the Chinese produced
vessels of their own design. Eventually Soviet assistance progressed to the point that a joint Sino-Soviet Pacific Ocean fleet
was under discussion.
Through the upheavals of the late 1950s and 1960s the Navy remained relatively undisturbed. Under the leadership of Minister
of National Defense Lin Biao, large investments were made in naval construction
during the frugal years immediately after the Great Leap
Forward. During the Cultural Revolution, a number of top
naval commissars and commanders were purged, and naval forces were used to suppress a revolt in Wuhan in July 1967, but the
service largely avoided the turmoil. Although it paid lip service to Mao and assigned political commissars aboard ships, the Navy
continued to train, build, and maintain the fleets.
PLAN sailors in Qingdao
In the 1970s, when approximately 20 percent of the defense budget allocated to naval forces, the Navy grew dramatically. The
conventional submarine force increased from 35 to 100 boats, the number of missile-carrying ships grew from 20 to 200, and the
production of larger surface ships, including support ships for oceangoing operations, increased. The Navy also began development
of nuclearpowered attack submarines and nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.
In the 1980s the Navy developed into a regional naval power with some blue-water capabilities. Naval construction continued at
a level somewhat below the 1970s rate. Modernization efforts encompassed higher educational and technical standards for
personnel; reformulation of the traditional coastal defense doctrine and force structure in favor of more blue-water operations;
and training in naval combined-arms operations involving submarine, surface, naval aviation, and coastal defense forces. Examples
of the expansion of China's blue-water naval capabilities were the 1980 recovery of an intercontinental ballistic missile
(ICBM) in the Western Pacific by a twenty-ship fleet, extended naval operations in the South China Sea in 1984 and 1985, and the
visit of two naval ships to three South Asian nations in 1985. In 1982 the Navy conducted a successful test of an
underwater-launched ballistic missile; in 1986 the Navy's order of battle included one or two (the exact number is classified, as
is the fate of the second submarine, if it did exist) Xia-class ballistic missile submarines armed with twelve CSS-NX-4 missiles
and three Han-classattack subs armed with six SY-2 cruise missiles. The Navy also had some success in developing a variety of
ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore, shore-to-ship, and air-to-ship missiles.
See also: Liu Huaqing
Future plans
In recent years, the PLAN has become more prominent owing to a change in Chinese strategic priorities. The possibility of a
massive land attack by the Soviet Union has receded, and the new strategic
threats include conflict with the United States or a resurgent Japan in areas such as Taiwan or the Spratly Islands.
As part of its overall program of naval modernization, there has been interest on the part of PLAN in building or acquiring an
aircraft carrier. However the carrier has appeared to have been
placed in a lower priority than other efforts to upgrade its aircraft and smaller ship forces.
Most naval analysts believe that, without significant modernization in other areas of its military, a PLAN aircraft carrier
would be militarily useless and would take resources away from other parts of the military. The main target of PRC military
interest, Taiwan, is within range of Chinese land aircraft and the PRC's main focus in case of a conflict over Taiwan would be
sea denial rather than power projection. This assessment
appears to be shared by the Chinese military and political leadership.
See also: Soviet aircraft carrier
Varyag
External links
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