Q&A: Chinese Small Arms w/ Jason Clower from Type 56: The Story of China’s Army

My book “Pistols of the Warlords” is available through Headstamp Publishing:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/chinese-pistols

Today I am very happy to welcome Jason Clower as our Q&A guest. Jason runs the channel “Type 56: The Story of China’s Army” where he teaches the history of the PLA and its small arms, combat tactics, strategy, and logistics to a depth found nowhere else in the English-speaking internet. So naturally, today’s questions are based on Chinese small arms history…

0:01:00 – The PLA and the bayonet.
0:08:00 – How did the Great Depression impact Chinese arms production?
0:14:03 – Was the Type 63 abandoned before or during the Cultural Revolution?

China’s Deadly Self-Sniper Rifle, the Type 63: https://youtu.be/R6RqP1Wb2IQ
China’s Type 63 Rifle: Better Than an AK-47 and SKS Combined?: https://youtu.be/_-6_VXjMSoc

0:16:49 – Has China just copied guns for the past 100 years or did they develop their own things?
0:23:55 – How does Chinese production quality compare to Eastern bloc nations?
0:29:15 – Different arms for Chiang Kai-shek and Mao?
0:34:46 – If Jason could have one Chinese gun, what would it be?

Chinese FN 1900s: From Wauser to Browningsbrowningsbrownings: https://youtu.be/u0dInANbfDU

0:37:02 – What about the SKS-M with its detachable AK magazine?
0:41:45 – How did it go from Cultural Revolution to massive SKS sales to Western consumers?
0:48:21 – Could the Type 79 have been successful as a concept?

Curse of China’s Type 79: The Gun That Blighted Every Life It Touched: https://youtu.be/bNOFa5__QJM
Type 79 SMG: China’s MP7 At Home: https://youtu.be/dWIbsLxqBPc

0:53:18 – Allocating leftover Civil War era guns to the militia vs to foreign military allies
0:58:56 – Did any modernizers survive Mao’s purges?
1:03:15 – Why are all the guns “Type 56”?
1:06:24 – What’s the “Q” designation all about?
1:07:15 – When did China develop a unique national identity in its small arms?
1:09:36 – Chinese RPD use
1:13:55 – Jason’s background

6 Comments

  1. The Cultural Revolution was actually a very Chines thing. There have been many very reactionary periods in Chinese history where anything “new’ or “foreign” were ruthlessly suppressed. Mao just took such to the extreme, which almost destroyed the country.

    • Had a look around at things going on over the last few decades here in the West…?

      The Cultural Revolution was only “unique” in the scale and depth of it all. Granted, the bright lights behind the French Revolution may have gone a little harder in terms of reimagining the world (remember their clocks and calendars…?), but they suffered from having to work with France, which had a much smaller population, and a lack of relatively modern communications infrastructure.

      Crap like the Cultural Revolution and its adulators here in the US are why I keep some select things buried in my backyard. Just in case, you know…

  2. Very informative and entertaining. Topical time hacks in the text are helpful and spot-on. Yellow tabs on the timeline have no apparent correlation to the topic times given.

  3. 17:25 Was there anything new in the Chinese small arms?
    Of course it was – now every Western gun manufacturer has a chassis model as the top of the line for pistols. And the first chassis semiautomatic pistol was the Chinese QBZ-92, then copied by the Ignaz Bubits (Steyr L9 series) – and now you have the chassis pistols all over Europe and US, with SIG-Sauer P320 replacing the Beretta.

    • Yeah… No.

      The “chassis pistol” idea actually goes back to Tokarev and Petter. All that the chassis idea does is fulfill the logical extension of the concepts embodied in both of those designer’s work.

  4. Kind of a bizarre time warp: Much discussion of Chi-com small arms in the 20th century, when we live in the 21st and the Chinese use a 5.8x42mm cartridge and suite of small arms. Great point about the vast majority of “Chinese native” designs being post-Type 63 debacle. If Type 56 Chinese Kalashnikovs made with slightly thicker sheet metal (China never adopted the AKM…) SKS carbines and RPDs appear in sub-Saharan African conflicts, then so too QLZ-87 35mm grenade launchers… And much else besides.

    I learn so much about “appropriate” technology from such discussions. Dr. Clower and Mr. M’Collum’s points about plugging elements in China’s “cupboard” into the conundrums industrial and technical is just great.

    If only “one Chinese gun” I would love a Gen. Liu 8x57mm rifle… If “one Chi-com” gun, that’d be tough. I mean, I have a Type 56 and I love it. Time was I had a great many more of ’em! I think a good “unicorn” or Qilin would have to be the Type 80 machine pistol!

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