Thoughts and Questions about PLA Ground Forces 

By 

Harlan W. Jencks
Center for Chinese Studies
University of California
Berkeley, California

and

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
University of California
Livermore, California 

18 October 2000

A paper prepared for the Conference on
 “Chinese Military Studies: A Conference on the State of the Field”
 National Defense University
 Washington, DC
October 26–27, 2000 

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or any of its sponsors.

 Introduction

I should point out that I haven’t really studied the ground forces in recent years. My focus has been on the new General Armaments Department, the nuclear industry, and strategic forces.  Perhaps Ron was wiser than he knew by asking somebody who used to know  a lot about the ground forces but doesn’t now; and teaming me up with Dennis Blasko, who knows a lot.  I think we’re kind of a good team.  I have historical perspective, and Dennis knows the facts.

Sources

In preparing this “think piece” paper, I found that many of my nitty-gritty questions were answered when I read Dennis Blasko’s draft chapter for the CAPS/Rand conference.^[1] I also have learned a great deal reading the chapter David Finkelstein wrote on the PLA General Staff Department, for the same conference—particularly the section on the  Operations Department.^[2]   Many of the questions that I had about training were addressed brilliantly in what I think is still the best thing ever written on that subject—a study written by Blasko, Klapakis and Corbett — all experienced attachés—for an earlier CAPS/Rand conference.^[3]

There are lots of interesting Web pages devoted to the PLA.   All information on the Web must be evaluated carefully because, for the most part, you don’t know much about the sources.  People who go to the time and trouble to maintain Web sites frequently have ideological axes to grind (though not always), and the information they provide is of uneven quality and quantity. For those of you who are not aware of it, a convenient entrance into this wonderful world is to access James Mulvenon’s Web site at <http://members.aol.com/mehampton/chinasec.html>.

I should point out that there is one vitally important source which served well for decades but has  been relegated to the status of a historical artifact: the DIA Handbook of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, published in 1984.[4]  I regard it as unconscionable that no new unclassified DIA handbook on the PLA has been published in 16 years. I was personally involved in an effort to publish a new one during 1990–91.  That effort was sidelined by the war with Iraq, the war on drugs, and (ultimately) lack of funding. Lonnie Henley tells me that the Marine Corps Intelligence Center is now in charge of publishing unclassified “cargo-pocket-sized” unclassified reference guides for line troops. I have not seen any of their products, and I wish they were more widely disseminated.

On the subject of unclassified information, let me put in an enthusiastic plug for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). For those of you who have any influence with the Congress at all, please, please  believe me: The intelligence dollar is nowhere spent better or more efficiently than when it is spent on FBIS.  There is an avalanche of Chinese language primary-source material out there which is not being translated because there are not enough people to do it, or even to collect it all.  Sadly, the hard-copy FBIS booklets are now a thing of the past.   FBIS is only available on the Web, which means that a new generation of graduate students are growing up without FBIS, unless they happen to be at China centers that can afford the excruciating subscription price to get FBIS on line.  This is tragic. In the best of all possible worlds, FBIS would not only be funded to hire six or seven times as many people and do six or seven times as much translation, but access to all of the FBIS material on the Web would be free. Our country, and the Free World, would benefit from that.

There are a couple of vitally important unclassified sources which were unthinkable when I began seriously studying the PLA in the late 1960s.  One of them is advertising copy. I still remember my excitement at reading my first NORINCO brochure in 1983. The Chinese were selling weapons, and here were nice colored pictures of them; it was amazing. By contrast, last month, I received a whole stack of nuclear industry brochures that Dennis had been nice enough to collect for me at an industrial exhibition in Beijing last March. Just keeping up with the advertising copy coming out of the military machine-building industries, would keep two or three FBIS translators busy full-time—even though half of it is in English.

Another source that was virtually unthinkable when I started out, is interviews with serving PLA officers.  This is not as easy as it was a couple of years ago because of the self-destructive hysterical nonsense that fell out from the alleged Chinese espionage involving the W-88 warhead. The Chinese may or may not have gotten some information about the W-88, but for sure the United States has lost a lot of information because of restrictions placed on Americans—especially official Americans—talking to Chinese. The Chinese can find plenty about us, simply by culling through all our open publications. There is a gigantic organization, currently housed in the PLA General Armament Department, called the China Defense Science and Technology Information Center (CDSTIC), which is probably the biggest open-source intelligence collector in the world. They find out all kinds of stuff about us from what we publish; they don’t violate any laws because they don’t have to.

By contrast, the Chinese are very careful—even paranoid— about what they publish openly or put on the Web.  But they can be remarkably open in face-to-face discussions.  What they tell us will usually be self-serving and have a political  spin on it; mostly in favor of their own organizations.  But a good analyst can take what he or she picks up at, say, the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, GAD headquarters, and COSTIND; and tease out a  pretty good picture of what’s really going on with respect to, say, arms and control and disarmament research. 

Other sources which are particularly useful include the Directory of PRC Military Personalities published annually by SEROLD in Hawaii.  It is based on decades of careful collecting of names and organizations from the PRC press.

Finally, looking at pictures—film, video, Web sites, and magazines like Bingqi Zhishi and Jiefangjun Huabao—can tell us a great deal, especially about equipment.  To a practiced eye, pictures can sometimes give interesting hints about PLA organizational practices, tactics, and SOPs, as well.

Questions

The PLA has had a three-tiered organizational structure since the anti-Japanese war.  Mao said the communist movement had three kinds of forces:  Main-force units would go anywhere, under central control, and were the best-equipped and the most professionally trained. Then there were local or regional forces, primarily responsible for area defense.  Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, there were vast numbers of militia, who provided replacements for the others, and provided logistical and other support near where they lived. During the Cultural Revolution, the militia also served as the party’s police force in rural China.

I’m not clear today on the extent to which that three-way division still persists. The militia is still there, and the main forces obviously are there.  What used to be local forces roles and missions now can be attributed to the PLA Reserve units and to the People’s Armed Police (PAP).  Both can be brought in under direct PLA control and can function as light infantry. All well and good, but here is the question:  Are all  reserve units local forces  under Military District (MD) control, or do some of them (as the official press implies) mobilize to fill out active-duty main-force units?  A related question:  How many active-duty PLA combat units (if any) are actually local forces under MD control as opposed to being, say, independent divisions of the main forces? I know of no specific case where I can say that an independent division is local force.  Are there any?

In recent years the militia seems to have declined in prestige and in its perceived military utility. My impression is that the militia is now almost exclusively a large, mobilizable labor force for use in big construction projects and disaster relief.  In terms of military utility, the Militia appears to weigh close to zero as a factor in PRC strategic planning. Perhaps this is just a function of the fact that the Chinese have finally realized what the Russians knew all along—it would be absolutely stupid for any country to try to invade China on the ground.  That being the case, there is no reason to expend resources maintaining hordes of militia at a high state of readiness.  They can be trained up as necessary in a relatively short time.

That leads me to wonder about the roles of the People’s Armed Forces Departments (PAFDs) in military subdistricts and some work units. PAFDs used to be the organizational link between the PLA and the militia.  Now, they seem to be restricted to mobilization, demobilization, and settlement of demobilized soldiers.  They presumably do whatever militia work there still is, and also may have some functions with respect to reserve units.

Speaking of reserve units, how do PLA reserve units mobilize, and how often?  Clearly they cannot operate on a two-days-a-month basis the way we do in the US, because they don’t have private automobiles. They just cannot assemble people from a wide geographical area with any speed or efficiency.  Either they are drawing the manpower for specific units from fairly restricted areas (say, one unit from one population center) or they are assembling reserve units much less frequently—perhaps for a full month just once a year. That would make a lot more sense, and allow for some useful training. They could coordinate it to agricultural cycles, and so forth. So I’d like to know how that is done; about the logistical and administrative nitty-gritty of reserve mobilization and training and manpower.

In terms of overall military organization, one of the continuing puzzles is that the Chinese have always formed temporary, ad hoc operational area commands (zhanqu) when they actually engaged in military operations. In 1979, for example, there was a Southern Command that actually directed the attack on Vietnam, and there was a Northern Command, formed out of three northern Military Regions (Shenyang, Beijing, and Lanzhou) facing toward the Soviet Union.  Similarly, during the Spring 1996 festivities, when the PLA was engaging in large-scale exercises and firing rockets across the Taiwan Strait, they formed what was described as the Fujian Front, rather than have the normal Nanjing Military Region run the show.  Why?

The Military Region Structure

Since the early 1980s periodic rumors have gone around Beijing about the Military Regions (MRs) being completely abolished. The fact that abolishing the MRs is even being considered—plus the practice of forming of War Fronts for actual operations—raises the question of just what it is that Military Regions do. What justifies their existence?  One possibility is logistical support.  In the summer of 1999, “PLA Joint Logistics Regulations” were promulgated (but still not published).[5] How is “joint logistics support” structured? Will it work through the Military Regions, or will it render them even more unnecessary?

According to Dennis’ CAPS/Rand paper, there are now seven identified helicopter units in the PLA ground forces, which “appear to be assigned to both MR and Group Army Headquarters depending on local situations.”^[6] There are also small special operations units in each MR, plus at least one PLA psychological operations unit (in the Shenyang MR). What are the command and control arrangements are for these organizations?  What relationships do they have to the Military Regions and the Group Armies?

I would also like to get clarification on the command relationship, if any, between Military Regions and the Combined Group Armies. This was one of the things, at least during the Maoist period, that distinguished the Main Force Corps (predecessors to today’s Group Armies) from the Regional Forces: They were not subject to the same chain of command as the Military Regions. Whether that has changed, and how, is very important for understanding the PLA ground forces.

In the course of jotting down questions for this paper over the past few weeks, I wrote down all kinds of questions about conversion of divisions to brigades:  How expensive is it? How many divisions have been reorganized? Are they all going to be reorganized? How many were abolished? How many have been upgraded with new equipment? and so forth.  I found to my surprise and pleasure that Dennis answered most of those questions in his CAPS/Rand paper. For those of you who don’t have copies of the conference draft, you can look forward to publication of a wonderful book tentatively entitled The PLA as  Organization,  which is being edited by James Mulvenon and Richard Yang.  It will include chapters on all the major organizations of the PLA, including a particularly brilliant study of the new General Armament Department.

One of the continuing issues that we’ve always had to deal with in looking at PLA organization, especially the ground forces, is the variability of units. There appear to be few formal Tables of Organization and Equipment (TO&Es) in the People's Liberation Army, and to the extent that there are formal TO&Es, they don’t appear to be adhered to.  It appears that with respect to equipment—everything from tanks and artillery pieces down to small arms—there are a lot of different types of equipment in use right now.  Naturally, that causes tremendous problems for supply, training, safety, parts management, maintenance, and all the rest of it. 

In the course of the extensive reorganization and downsizing of the ground forces that has been going on since 1996, some fairly new modern equipment has been issued to some units.  In the course of consolidating and abolishing units, a lot of equipment was reshuffled.  Units that got factory-new equipment “cascaded” their former equipment down to slightly lower priority units which, in turn, “cascaded” equipment down to still lower priority units. I’m wondering about the equipment that “fell out at the bottom”—things like T-34 tanks and Type-54 122 mm howitzers and Anshan rifles: What happened to that stuff? Is it being melted down? Sold off? Refurbished? Are they turning the vehicles into farm machinery? Or is it all sitting in storage somewhere, “just in case?”

Dennis has a marvelous treatment of the various kinds of main battle tanks currently in PLA service, and how many there appear to be of each type.  I wonder if we have similar information on light tanks and amphibious tanks. Is there any kind of a prospect for anything to replace them with something comparable or better?

Admirable as Blasko’s study of organizational change is, he doesn’t address battalions, companies, platoons, and squads at all—something that I am very interested in. I was not aware of anybody working on that level, until I was contacted a few months ago by Martin Andrew, a Royal Australian Air Force officer who has been trying to work out PLA organization and weapons at the lowest levels. He has learned some interesting facts which square with hardware information we have available, mainly from Jane’s Infantry Weapons  yearbooks.  Martin has kindly shared his work, and with his permission, I have appended a lightly edited version of a short essay of his on squad-level weapons.  He notes the continuing lack of credible anti-armor weapons in the Chinese infantry.

One of the remarkable things that he pointed out is the situation with the basic Chinese infantry rifle.  We find that the PLA may be suffering from a self-inflicted wound in the form of a new 5.8 X 43 mm rifle cartridge. In some units it will presumably replace the standard 7.62 mm cartridges that the PLA has been using since the Korean War.  But recall that it took decades for the PLA to gradually arm most of its companies with machineguns in the two standard Soviet 7.62 calibers, and its soldiers with the Type-56 assault rifle—the Chinese copy of the Soviet AK-47.  Some units now are armed with the Type-81 assault rifle, which is a product improved Type-56, and the Type-74 light machinegun—both still 7.62mm.

Then—during the Hong Kong hand-over in 1997—there came along a brand-new “Bull-Pup” design called the Type-87—which nobody had ever seen before.  My first assumption was that it was designed around either the Soviet 5.45 mm cartridge, or NATO 5.56 mm.  The latter seemed more probable, because the Chinese have been manufacturing a copy of our M-16 rifle (the “CQ” rifle) and its ammunition for about 10 years now.  But no, they have developed a new 5.8mm cartridge.  Now, if there is anything the PLA does not need  it is a new small arms caliber. Oh yes, a somewhat heavier bullet might penetrate brush a little better,  and be a bit more accurate at long range.  But it clearly isn’t worth it to try to convert the world’s biggest army to new, untried, completely unique ammunition. The logistical problems alone will add an enormous new burden, if they actually deploy 5.8 mm weapons.

If they are going to do combined arms, they need to have the flexibility of reliable, secure, redundant communications.  Clearly the PLA has made enormous strides in this area. They are much better at electronic communications than they were 5 or 10 years ago.  But that all seems to be at the upper levels of command.  What about tactical radios? How many are there? How far down the chain of command are they deployed? Do all company commanders have tactical radios?  How about platoon leaders? Squad leaders? My guess is that there are probably some that do, and some that don’t. Do they have on-line encryption capabilities, or do they have to screw around with one-time pads and code books?  Or do the just talk in the clear, trusting in their language for security (as the Russians did at Tannenburg)?  After a couple of decades of increasing the amount of electronics in units, do they now have enough tactical communications that it is possible for higher-level commanders to try to micro-manage platoons and squads, the way they like to do in the US Army?  If so, the PLA has a whole new set of problems that it never had before.

If it is true that they have a lot more tactical radios, computers, and other electronics in combat units, that almost automatically means the PLA is more vulnerable to electronic warfare.  They are aware of the problem, but what are they doing to protect themselves?

Combined Arms?

How standardized are tactical units below division or brigade level?   This is a serious question because of the need, if the PLA is going to get really serious about combined arms operations, to tailor task forces.  Say you are a division commander, with infantry regiments and tank regiments, and you are operating in wide-open terrain. You’re going to need armor across the whole sector. That’s going to mean cross-attaching infantry and tanks together. If the infantry are not mounted on TO&E carriers, there will have to be provision for motorizing them somehow, so they can keep up with the tanks. Then when you get to a built-up area, you will have to reorganize yourself so you can go into the town with an infantry-heavy organization and your tanks in a fire-support role. In fast-moving operations, you may find yourself reorganizing on a daily basis. 

The reason I raise this issue in the context of organizational standardization is this:  Let’s say you’re an infantry battalion commander and you’re ordered to give up one of your infantry companies—to send them over to a certain tank regiment.  That tank regiment is ordered to send a tank company to you.  You and that tank battalion commander have only an hour or so to organize two battalion task forces before you kick off an attack.  What kind of tanks does the attached company have? What kind of guns? Do their machineguns and yours fire common ammunition? You’ve got to feed them, so how many crewmen are there in these tanks? How heavy are those tanks and how wide are their treads? Will they break down every bridge in your sector because they are 55-ton monsters?  Or can you run them across the bridges with no problem because they weigh only 35 tons? 

You need to know these things, plus an awful lot more, about what’s getting attached to you. If it’s a standard building block, you can do that fairly painlessly.  The armies of NATO and of the former Warsaw Pact have been doing it routinely since the 1940s.  As a mech infantry platoon leader in Germany in the mid-1960s, I got attached out to tank companies from several different tank battalions without too much grief. They knew what to expect.  My company commander, who got a tank platoon in exchange for me, knew what to expect.  We had enough problems just dealing with specific issues like the manning level (How many people do you actually have present for duty, and how many vehicles are actually running, as opposed to your TO&E strength?).  Those problems are serious enough without worrying about whether your radios and small arms ammo are compatible. You just can’t take time to get used to a completely new organization every time you get cross-attached.  Standardization matters.

It will be interesting to see how  the PLA deploys new equipment; the way it is grouped within the new Brigades. Dennis Blasko provides a good example in his paper: As PLA units get organized with their Russian SA-15 Gauntlet  air defense systems, will they all be consolidated at division level in an air defense battalion, and then attached out for operations? If so, they will be much better able to provide logistical support, to train people, to maintain standards; to make sure all SA-15 units are doing things the same way.  But there is a down-side: Those SA-15 crews will not spend any garrison time with the people they have to fight with.  Even if they routinely attach the same SA-15 unit to the same maneuver unit, they have to get used to each other again whenever they deploy.  The system of command and control that operates in garrison is different from the one in the field. So how is that going to work? And how well will the maneuver battalion commanders and operations officers understand how to utilize those SA-15s?

The alternative is to assign  one or two SA-15s to each maneuver battalion.  The pluses and minuses of that arrangement are mirror-image to consolidating them at division level. These are perennial problems, with either consolidating support weapons, or assigning them out to maneuver units. That’s why armies periodically reorganize.  Support weapons tend to get consolidated in one reorganization, and then decentralized in the next.

One good answer to the problem is to consolidate the systems in specialized units, but spend a lot of time training in the field.  The more frequently the support weapons get attached out, the more smoothly they make the transition from garrison to field chains of command.  But field training is hard on equipment; and realistic  field training is very  hard on equipment.  The PLA, to date, has tended to keep its equipment in good shape by not using it very much. 

The last item I’d like to address is the status of the ground forces.  Since 1927, the ground forces have dominated the PLA. Their dominance of the high command is symbolized by the very absence of a ground forces branch (bingzhong). There has been some speculation recently that a ground forces service branch might be created.  That would actually imply a reduction  of ground force dominance. It would recognize in some sense an equal status with the Air Force, Navy, and Second Artillery.  However, it seems to me that that might actually hinder the maturation of combined arms operations.  The organizational status quo, dominated by the ground forces, at least means that there is no ground force service branch to be an obstacle to combined arms operations.

One of the reasons for the abolition of the separate anti-chemical, engineer, communications, capital construction engineer, field artillery, and armored bingzhong  back in the 1970s was that the Beijing headquarters of each of those service branches was dragging its feet, and insisting upon its prerogatives.  Even getting tanks and infantry to exercise together required coordination all the way up the chain to the top. That made combined arms operations impossible, so those bingzhong  were all downgraded to sub-departments of the Service Arms Department of the General Staff.  A Ground Forces Branch might well inhibit combined arms the same way.

It is widely recognized that the PLA talks a great deal about combined arms but doesn’t do it very much or very well.  It is not clear to me whether that is because of resistance to change, or ignorance, or both. I doubt that it’s ignorance at the top. In the General Staff Department, the Academy of Military Sciences, and the National Defense University, they are well aware of the contents of US Army FM 100-5—they cite it.  They write about “multi-dimensional warfare,” in air-land-sea-cyberspace. They understand it at the top, but at lower levels there still may be a good deal of ignorance.  And where there is ignorance, there tends to be fear and resistance. This could be the biggest problem that the PLA faces right now—just getting troop leaders at the middle and lower levels to understand what is expected of them, and convincing them that it is possible, and will not upset their mental universe.

The PLA has clearly been building a command, control, and communications infrastructure, and writing the doctrine to do combined arms.  The doctrine has been written for the most part, although I am not aware that they have gotten down to the nitty-gritty of forming company task forces by cross-attaching platoons and that sort of thing.  Still, judging from the propaganda films—even when the PLA is doing its very best to really put on a good show—it appears they don’t quite get the concept. Their idea seems to be that different services show up in the same general area and do things more or less simultaneously, and that’s “combined arms.”  To put it in nitty-gritty terms, I’m not aware of any case of a forward-deployed PLA company or battalion calling for air support and getting an on-call air strike.  The Germans did it in 1940, and by 1945, all the major armies in the war were doing it.  As far as I can tell, the PLA has never done it.

Conclusion

Blasko noted at the end of his CAPS/Rand paper that the PLA right now is attempting to upgrade the education level of its officers; reduce conscription time for ground-force soldiers from three years to two (which of course has tremendous implications for the training level); build an NCO corps; change its doctrine to “Local Wars Under Modern High-Technology Conditions;” implement a regularized professional education system; integrate PLA efforts with the reserve forces and the PAP; get rid of all their commercial enterprises; and prepare for a Taiwan contingency—all at once. As Blasko observed, any one of those changes would be disruptive to any military force.  Armies tend to be conservative organizations, and the ground forces are the most conservative part of the PLA. They certainly have their work cut out for them, and we who are trying to study them have certainly got our work cut out for us.

The People’s Liberation Army in the Future

By

Martin Andrew 

Introduction

This paper will look at basic building blocks of the People’s Liberation Army – the platoon and the infantry squad.   The new doctrine of ‘People’s War Under High Tech Conditions’ still sees the infantry as the key component as their supporting arms are not as well equipped as the infantry when compared with Western Forces. As light infantry in mountainous, jungle and urban conditions they are equipped on par with many Western armies but their lack of an infantry portable anti-armour guided weapon leaves them vulnerable to armour in the open.

Structure

In 1938 the basic squad of the 8th Route Army comprised three teams of three to five men armed with bolt action rifles, hand grenades and on paper, one automatic rifle or light machine gun.^[i]   In the early 1980s a typical PLA infantry squad comprised 12 soldiers equipped with one Type 56 (RPD) light machine gun, 11 Type 56 (AK47) assault rifles and one Type 69 (RPG 7) anti-armour rocket launcher.^[ii]    The Type 69 RPG launcher and Type 74 light machine gun require two man teams to be effective, and with the  commander this left seven riflemen in the squad.   This structure was more in line with the British and German Armies.   Camouflage was not neglected with uniforms having an integral hood having been available to the Chinese infantry from at least the early 1970s.^[iii]       

The present PLA infantry section has now gone back to the structure of its roots in the 8th Route Army.   The squad now contains two fire teams each with a Type 74 squad automatic weapon, assault rifles, and one of the squads has a rocket propelled grenade launcher.   The Type 74 uses a 101 round drum magazine and can use Type 56 magazines as well.   The Type 81assault rifle has been seen in the hands of the PLA and is a product improved version of the Type 56.    The Type 74 compares favourably in weight and length with the M-249 Minimi and the recent Special Purpose Weapon variant of the Minimi.

Anti-Armour

Currently the only effective anti-armour weapons available to the Chinese infantry are rocket propelled grenades, either the Type 69 rocket launcher or one of the disposable types to the Chinese army similar to the M-72.   The Chechens used virtually identical weapons.   The effectiveness of the Russian RPG-2 and RPG-7 in the anti-armour role is open to debate.   In Grozny during the Russian attack of December 1994 and January 1995 the vast majority of kills to Russian armour were from RPG hits.   To be fair to the Russians some of their tanks required twenty hits to be destroyed.^[iv]    This correlates with the effectiveness of rocket propelled grenades in the Vietnam War.   The original PG-7 HEAT round for the RPG-7 was used in Vietnam, had a self-destruct fuze of 3.5 seconds initiated upon firing, and had a maximum range of approximately 950 m [Jencks comment: Only for area targets.  Effective anti-vehicle range was about 400m.  End of comment].   The PG-7 warhead contained 0.3kg of cast TNT/RDX that gave it a useful capability against bunkers and personnel as well.   The updated HEAT rounds for the RPG-7 have a similar amount of explosive but of differing internal design.   During the Vietnam War, Army of the Republic of Vietnam figures showed that M-113 armoured personnel carriers had one penetration for every seven RPG hits.   The hits themselves averaged one in eight to one in ten rounds fired.^[v]   The figures did not differentiate between the RPG –2 and RPG –7.   The RPG –7 is a more accurate weapon and the hit rate would have been more for that weapon.   Statistical analysis showed that that only one M-113 was destroyed for every seven penetrations and casualties were 0.8 per penetration.   This was invariably the unfortunate soul that was in the path of the penetration.^[vi]   The Chinese Army has different types of warheads available for their Type 69 rocket launcher.^[vii]

Future Weapons

Small Arms    The Chinese experimented with various calibres between 5.5mm and 6mm before deciding on 5.8mm.^[viii]   Identified as the 5.8 x 43mm, the cartridge was adopted in 1989 but the rifle for it was not introduced into service until 1995.^[ix]   Called the Type 87 assault rifle, it is a bullpup design which was first seen carried publicly by the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison when they rode in during the hand-over.^[x]   It can carry an attached grenade launcher similar in design to the M-203 that was also first seen publicly after Hong Kong’s hand-over.   The Type 87 appears to have design faults.   It has too many parts, especially rods, when field stripped.   Due to the rifle’s short sight radius the sighting would be improved with the fitting of an optic sight.^[xi]    Worse still, the 30 round magazine protrudes too far below the pistol grip to allow firing lying down.^[xii]   The rifle weighs 3.35kg empty and is 758mm long compared to the light support version.   The light support weapon is equipped with a bipod and drum magazine and weighs 3.95kg empty and is 840mm in length.^[xiii]  With a fully loaded drum magazine the weapon is unbalanced due to the weight of the magazine near the butt.   This would make it awkward to carry and use in action.

Uniforms and Webbing            The Chinese Ready Reaction Forces have been seen in equipped with new uniforms, boots, with new chest webbing and helmets all in the same camouflage pattern.^[xiv]   The helmet and webbing designs are similar to United States designs.  The People’s Armed Police in Xinjiang have also been photographed in similar camouflage uniforms, two different types of non camouflaged chest webbing and Type 81 assault rifles.   As mentioned earlier the Type 81 is a modern design and with the chest webbing holding at least five magazines the PAP personnel are equipped for combat, not for show.^[xv]    

Anti-Armour            The Ready Reaction Forces require some sort of anti-armour guided weapon like the Milan, Javelin or AT-7 that has a greater range and is more accurate than the Type 69 RPG.