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The People's Liberation Army Navy[a], also known as the People's Navy, PLA Navy or simply Chinese Navy, is the naval warfare branch of the People's Liberation Army, the national military of the People's Republic of China. It is composed of five sub-branches: the Surface Force, the Submarine Force, the Coastal Defense Force, the Marine Corps and the Naval Air Force, with a total strength of 252,000 personnel, including 35,000 marines and 18,000 naval aviation personnel.[5] The PLAN's combat units are deployed among three theater command fleets, namely the North Sea, East Sea and South Sea Fleet, which serve the Northern, Eastern and Southern Theater Command, respectively.
The PLAN was formally established on 23 April 1949[6] and traces its lineage to maritime fighting units during the Chinese Civil War, including many defected elements of the Republic of China Navy. Until the late 1980s, the PLAN was largely a riverine and littoral force (brown-water navy) mostly in charge of coastal defense and patrol against potential Nationalist amphibious invasions and territorial waters disputes in the East and South China Sea (roles that are now largely relegated to the paramilitary China Coast Guard), and had been traditionally a maritime support subordinate to the PLA Ground Force. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese leadership were freed from overland border concerns with the northern neighbor and shifted towards more forward-oriented foreign and national security policies in the 1990s, and the PLAN leaders were able to advocate for renewed attention toward limited command of the seas as a green-water navy operating in the marginal seas within the range of coastal air parity.
Into the 21st century, Chinese military officials have outlined plans to operate with blue water capability between the first and second island chains,[7] with Chinese strategists talking about the modernization of the PLAN into "a regional blue-water defensive and offensive navy."[8] Transitioning into a blue-water navy, regular naval exercises and patrols have increased in the Taiwan Strait, the Senkaku Islands/Diaoyutai in the East China Sea, and within the nine-dash line in the South China Sea, and all of which China claims as its territory[9][10][11] despite the Republic of China (ROC, i.e. Taiwan), Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines each also claiming a significant part of the South China Sea.[12][13] Some exercises and patrols of the PLAN in recent years went as close as the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Japan, Taiwan, and Alaska although undisputed territorial waters have been not been crossed except in cases of innocent passage.[14][15][16][17]
As of 2024[update], the PLAN is the second-largest navy in the world by total displacement tonnage[18] — at 2 million tons in 2021, behind only the United States Navy (USN)[19] — and the largest navy globally by number of active sea-going ships (excluding coastal missile boats, gunboats and minesweepers)[20][21] with over 370 surface ships and submarines in service,[22] compared to approximately 292 ships and submarines in the USN.[23] However, the Chinese fleets are much newer and smaller in tonnage, as about 70% of their warships were launched after 2010 and consist mostly of newly designed destroyers, frigates and corvettes with only a few amphibious warfare ships and the two commissioned aircraft carriers, while only about 25% of the American ships were launched after 2010 and majority of their tonnage are from its eleven 100,000-ton supercarriers, 21 large amphibious assault ships and experimental capital ships such as the Zumwalt-class destroyers.[24] The dominance of Chinese shipbuilding capacity (over 230 times greater than the United States, according to the Alliance for American Manufacturing[25]) have led the Office of Naval Intelligence to project that China will have 475 battle force ships by 2035 while the USN will have 305 to 317,[26] which would put the United States in a numerical and operational disadvantage especially in the West Pacific according to a chair naval strategy professor at the Naval War College.[27]
I am a member of the People's Liberation Army. I promise that I will follow the leadership of the Communist Party of China...
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