On 30 June, five days after the outbreak of the war, Zhou decided to send a group of Chinese military intelligence personnel to North Korea to establish better communications with Kim as well as to collect firsthand materials on the fighting.

The MiG-15s in PRC colours would be an unpleasant surprise to the UN pilots; they would hold local air superiority against the F-80 Shooting Stars until newer F-86 Sabres were deployed.

It has been alleged by the Chinese that the Soviets had agreed to full scale air support, which never occurred south of Pyongyang, and helped accelerate the Sino-Soviet split.

Stalin initially agreed to send military equipment and ammunition but warned Zhou that the Soviet Air Force would need two or three months to prepare any operations.

In a subsequent meeting, Stalin told Zhou that he would only provide China with equipment on a credit basis and that the Soviet Air Force would only operate over Chinese airspace, and only after an undisclosed period of time.

During daylight activity or marching, soldiers were to remain motionless if an aircraft appeared, until it flew away;[23] PVA officers were under order to shoot security violators.

[21] MacArthur's public statements that he wanted to extend the Korean War into China, and return the Kuomintang regime to power reinforced this fear.

On 15 October Truman traveled to Wake Island to discuss with UN Commander General Douglas MacArthur the possibility of Chinese intervention and his desire to limit the scope of the Korean War.

[26] During the PVA's First Phase Offensive in the Korean War between October and November 1950, large quantities of captured U.S. weapons were widely used because of the availability of the required ammunition and the increasing difficulty of re-supplying across the Yalu River because of numerous UN-conducted air interdiction operations.

In addition, there was also a local copy of the U.S. Thompson submachine gun being produced by the PRC, based on the type of which had already been exported to and used in China since the 1930s and by UN troops during the Korean War.

Task Force Faith managed to inflict heavy casualties onto the PVA divisions, but in the end it was destroyed with 2,000 men killed or captured, and losing all vehicles and most other equipment.

[6] UN forces in northeast Korea withdrew to form a defensive perimeter around the port city of Hŭngnam, where an evacuation was carried out in late December.

The rest of the war involved little territory change, large-scale bombing of the population in the north, and lengthy peace negotiations, which started in Kaesong on 10 July 1951.

For the UN forces, the goal was to recapture all of what had been South Korea before an agreement was reached in order to avoid loss of any territory and the PVA attempted similar operations.

With the UN's and PVA's acceptance of India's proposal for an armistice, fighting ended 27 July 1953, by which time the front line was back around the proximity of the 38th parallel.

[39] Discipline was applied universally within the army, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members expected to be punished more than non-Party soldiers for the same infraction.

[39] Normally, public shamings and political indoctrination camps were the preferred methods for dealing with serious infractions such as desertion, and the punished were expected to return to frontline duty with their original units.

[39] Like the Soviet Army, political and military officers formed a dual chain of command within the PVA, and this arrangement could be found as low as the company level.

[48] Mass starvation and diseases soon swept through those camps during the winter of 1950–51, while numerous death marches were conducted by the PVA to move the prisoners into permanent locations.

[51] The Chinese have defended their actions by stating that all PVA soldiers during this period were also suffering mass starvation and diseases due to the lack of a competent logistics system.

[52][53] The UN POWs, however, pointed out that a lot of the Chinese camps were located near the Sino-Korean border, and claimed that the starvation was used to force the prisoners to accept the communist indoctrination programs.

[54] During the Korean War, Edward Hunter, who worked at the time both as a journalist and as a U.S. intelligence agent, wrote a series of books and articles on the allegations of Chinese mind control, which he coined as "brainwashing".

[citation needed] The term punned on the Taoist custom of "cleansing/washing the heart" (洗心, xǐ xīn) prior to conducting certain ceremonies or entering certain holy places.

Hunter and those who picked up the Chinese term used it to explain why, unlike in earlier wars, a relatively high percentage of American GIs defected to the enemy side after becoming prisoners-of-war.

[64] More recent writers including Mikhail Heller have suggested that Lifton's model of brainwashing may throw light on the use of mass propaganda in other communist states such as the former Soviet Union.

[67] In addition, Herbert Brownell Jr., the Attorney General of the United States, once said publicly that "if American prisoners of war cooperate with the Communist Party during their imprisonment in North Korea, they will face charges of treason that may carry out the death penalty.

At first glance, there appeared to be nothing to argue about, since the Geneva Conventions of 1949, by which both sides had pledged to abide, called for the immediate and complete exchange of all prisoners upon the conclusion of hostilities.

However, western and other sources estimate that about 400,000 Chinese soldiers were either killed in action or died of disease, starvation, exposure, and accidents with around 486,000 wounded, out of around 3 million military personnel deployed in the war by China.

Although Chinese had their own reasons to enter the war (i.e. a strategic buffer state in the Korean peninsula), the view that the Soviets had used them as proxies was shared in the Western bloc.

It takes the form of a memoir written by the fictional character Yu Yuan, a man who eventually becomes a soldier in the Chinese People's Volunteer Army and who is sent to Korea to fight on the Communist side in the Korean War.