Group armies

Group armies or army groups (simplified Chinese: 集团军; traditional Chinese: 集團軍; pinyin: jituan jun) are corps-level military formations of the People's Liberation Army of China.

In March 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency identified some 35 field corps:

In the mid-1980s, Deng Xiaoping began to redefine PLA orientation radically, beginning with a reassessment in 1985 of the overall international security environment that lowered the probability of a major or nuclear war. Instead, Deng asserted that China would be confronted with limited, local wars on its periphery. The natural consequence of this sweeping reassessment was an equally comprehensive reorientation of the Chinese military. The number of military regions was reduced from 11 to 7, and the 37 field armies were restructured to bring “tank, artillery, anti-aircraft artillery, engineer, and NBC defense units under a combined arms, corps-level headquarters called the Group Army.” Between 1985 and 1988, the 37 field armies were reduced to 24 group armies, and thousands of units at the regimental level and above were disbanded.

Potential disbanded field armies may have included:

From 1997 to 2000, force reductions resulted in the disbandment of three group armies: the 28th (BMR), 64th (Dalian, Liaoning, SMR), and the 67th Group Army at Zibo, Shandong, in the Jinan Military Region. (Blasko, 2006, 74) In September 2003, a further series of reductions were announced, and from 2003 to 2006 the 24th Group Army at Chengde, Hebei, the 63rd at Taiyuan, Shaanxi (both BMR), and the 23rd Group Army at Harbin in the Shenyang Military Region were eliminated. (Blasko, 2006, 75).

The People's Liberation Army Ground Force has 18 regular 集团军 or 'Group Armies'. However, a modern Chinese army group is a corps-sized combined arms formation with gross manpower ranging from 45,000 to 60,000 personnel. Each of the PLA’s seven military regions is assigned two or three group armies.

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