Tanks in China

This article on military tanks deals with the history of tanks employed by various military forces belonging to the Kuomintang and Communist Party of China within China. From the early half of the 20th century, tanks were initially obtained from other countries; eventually indigenously designed Chinese tanks started manufacture and became used during the Cold War and towards the modern era.

The first tanks and armored cars in Chinese hands were whatever imports they could acquire and some armoured vehicles they fashioned ad hoc, as China had few factories and a weak industrial base to build them. In China, every sort of available import and captured weapon was used. Warlords set up their own armies and bought what tanks and weapons they could. Standardization was functionally non-existent. Many local armour versions were assembled from materials on hand, as an example, armoured cars were built in Shanghai based on the GMC 1931 truck with a 37 mm gun and 2 MGs in a crude turret. The use of tanks along with artillery in the Chinese army was generally in ones and twos, and they were usually hoarded to enhance the power and prestige of a commander, governor or warlord (the last two were often one and the same). The training of armored forces along with artillery crews was cursory and rudimentary, and there was very little understanding of indirect fire, targeting and observation, fire and maneuver, counter-battery fire, barrage fire. The Chinese use of armored fighting vehicles prior to 1943 suffered from many of the same problems as that of the artillery, and most of China's small inventory of AFVs were quickly lost in combat, or were simply allowed to break down due to lack of maintenance and spare parts. Armor was not used en masse for shock, but in penny packets in an infantry support role exclusively; tank against tank fighting with the Japanese was never contemplated and never attempted. During the entire Sino-Japanese war from 1937-1945 there was not one single major tank on tank confrontation between Chinese and Japanese armor.

After the decline and overthrow of the Qing Dynasty following the Xinhai Revolution, China was left without any generally recognized central authority and the army quickly fragmented into forces of combating warlords. Sun Yat-sen, first provisional president of China and his protégé Chiang Kai-shek tried to bring under control the warlords who controlled much of the nation. In order to militarily take control of China his party, the Kuomintang ("Chinese National People's Party"), formed a fragile alliance with the Communists, and in the early 1920s Sun received help from the Comintern for his acceptance of Chinese Communist Party members into his Kuomintang. Russian advisers came in to help train and build up his military, and many were experienced from the Russian Civil War and had worked primarily on armoured trains which was important in the vast distances of China. Trains were intended to be used offensively and could carry troops, weapons and supplies. Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen's close ally, took Sun's place in the party when the latter died in 1925 and led the Northern Expedition to unify the country, becoming China's overall leader. This led to a break with the Communists and the expulsion of their Soviet advisors and a strengthening of Sino-German cooperation, along with German advisers and weapons and training. The cooperation intensified with the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 to the start of the war with Japan in 1937, when Japan, now an ally of Germany, asked it withdraw its military advisors. The Russians became advisors again but by 1939 the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Germany and relations started to cool. With the signing of the Soviet and Japanese non-aggression pact, China turned to the US. The US could only offer limited official help until the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the Americans into World War II and massive amounts of aid including US tanks. After World War II ended in 1945, the hostility between the ROC and the CPC (Communist Party of China) exploded into open civil war and many former Japanese weapons were used by both sides. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist cause went steadily downhill until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and drove the Nationalists from the Chinese mainland onto Taiwan and other islands.

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