Naval weaponry of the People's Liberation Army Navy

The naval weaponry of the PLAN is based on three tiers: artillery, torpedoes, and missiles, each geared to a specific threat range and type.

Furthermore, economic and technical sophistication to produce the fire control, targeting systems, and tracking capabilities were not in place until the mid-1980s.

The PLAN never possessed battleships or battlecruisers, and the use of a ship's main guns is mostly in standoff capacity, as they have never engaged in close-shore support from cruisers or destroyers.

The old manually operated Type-61 37 mm weapon is gradually being phased out in favor of automatic weaponry, but it nonetheless remains on board many littoral and major combatant vessels.

Although the Type 76 twin 37 mm gun is fully automatic, it has an open turret and thus is subject to harsh environment, which causes reliability problems.

Another shortcoming of the Type 76 twin 37 mm gun is that like its manually operated predecessor, it lacks fire control systems.

Type 76A twin 37 mm gun was thus developed to solve these problems by introducing an enclosed turret and fire control systems.

The purchase of two additional Sovremenny class destroyers will give PLAN the Kashtan CIWS system (gun and SAM combination).

The agility of small coastal craft coupled with fast torpedoes was a grave threat for larger combat vessels.

In April 1958, Naval Arms Ministry of People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) established torpedo research institute indigenously.

Everything appeared to be great but the subsequent Sino-Soviet split ended the promising future: from July 28 to September 1, 1960, former Soviet Union had quickly withdrawn all of its advisors from China.

To compound the problem, other domestic political turmoils such as Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had further seriously hindered the indigenous Chinese torpedo developments.

PLAN forces have had their ASW capabilities somewhat improved with the introduction of Variable Depth Sonar (VDS), which is mounted on some frigates and destroyers.

Strategic minefields could be laid around the Taiwan Strait to deny access or delay deployment of US Navy forces, particularly aircraft carrier battle groups and submarines.

The first of these, Moored-1 (Mao-1), a large sized moored mine entered mass production in 1962 after being tested multiple times and evaluated by the navy.

Also in 1970, Fengxi Machinery Factory and Engineering Technology Equipment Research Institute begun to jointly develop a riverine moored mine that can be remotely controlled fuse.

Chinese naval mines with known designations: The PLAN has three main categories of missiles: anti-ship, anti-air and land-attack.

Since the 1960s, China has manufactured its own models of anti-ship missile based on the SS-N-2 Styx, in the form of HY-1, SY-1, SY-2, and other airborne and ground-launched systems.

The fundamental shortcoming of missiles based on the SS-N-2 Styx are being short-ranged (only 40–100 km), slow, low in agility, and is rather large and easily detectable targets for modern SAM and CIWS.

This missile externally appears similar to the French Exocet and American Harpoon, but is essentially a Chinese designed weapon system.

Unlike older designs, the YJ8 could attack targets at low altitudes to reduce its vulnerability to CIWS, and has greater Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) to prevent enemy jamming.

The latest variant is the YJ-83, with a range exceeding 250 km, and capable of making its final approach at Mach 1.5 to penetrate ship defenses.

Though the YJ8 series does not have the advance 'pop up' approach or checkpoint flight characteristics of the Harpoon, it is respected as one of the most potent anti-ship missiles ever developed.

The YJ83's performance in some areas is superior to even the latest variants of Harpoon and Exocet, though its ECM and agility is thought to be slightly inferior.

The purchase of Russian Sovremenny class destroyers meant China obtained the medium-range SA-N-7 SAM and its subsequent improved models.

Meanwhile, China had developed the HQ-9 system, believed to have partially borrowed some of the features on both Russian S-300 and US Patriot technology (fire control).

This means that the future 094 class SSBN can patrol near Chinese waters and launch missiles that could hit the American mainland.

This installation may be seen as an experiment by the PLAN to make use of older warship designs, by turning them into shore bombardment platforms.

Three western combat data systems were known to be purchased by China, including British Racal Marine Radar CTC-1629, Italian Alenia SADOC 2, and French Thomson-CSF TAVITAC.

All DPV/SDVs (swimmer transportation devices) fielded by this contractor are developed by the design team with the following members: Liu Ning (刘宁), You Yun (犹云), Jin Zhongxian (金仲贤), Chen Haizhen (陈海珍), and Zhang Chun (张春).