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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 PLAN also includes 35,000 Coastal Defence Force and 56,000 Naval infantry/Marines, plus a 56,000 PLAN Aviation operating several hundred landbased aircraft and shipbased helicopters. The original strategy of the PLAN was a combination of Maoist guerrilla warfare and the Soviet young officers school.
History Formed 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.
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, under the leadership of Commander Liu Huaqing, 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.
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 (or its successor state, Russia) 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, the PLAN is trying to develop a blue water navy; there has been interest on the part of the 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 the PLAN's aircraft, submarine and smaller ship forces.
Fleets The Chinese Navy is divided into three fleets. - the North Sea Fleet, headquatered in Qingdao, Shandong Province, patrols the Bohai Bay and the Yellow Sea. Its flag ship is DDG Harbin.
- the East Sea Fleet, headquatered in Ningpo, Zhejiang Province, patrols the East China Sea, which is called the Eastern Sea in Chinese. Its flag ship is J302 Chongmingdao.
- the South Sea Fleet, headquatered in Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, patrols the South China Sea, or the South Sea in Chinese. Its flag ship is AOR/AK Nanchang.
Current Fleet
Destroyers
Frigates
Submarines
See also: Soviet aircraft carrier Varyag
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