By Top War
Traditionally, the key player in the global arms market in the air defense segment was the Soviet Union, and after its collapse, Russia took this place. However, in the last decade, somehow imperceptibly, our country in this area has been seriously pushed aside by China, which has intercepted a number of important contracts with countries that in the past focused on systems Defense Soviet and Russian production. Thus, Beijing not only receives financial profit, but also increases its political influence in various regions of the planet.
However, it would be wrong to think that this trend has emerged only recently. The Chinese have long been working with developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, concluding relatively small financial deals for the supply of simple and cheap air defense systems with third world countries that are of no interest to such a Russian defense giant as the Almaz-Antey concern, whose top management is accustomed to operating with billions of dollars.
This Chinese practice began to form about half a century ago, and in the sphere of air defense systems, it all began with anti-aircraft machine guns, which, despite their technological simplicity and very limited range, were and remain very popular in armed conflicts around the world. Due to their versatility, low cost, ease of use and high mobility, anti-aircraft machine guns remain in the arsenals of large armies of leading countries and are in service with various kinds of irregular formations, armed movements and extremist groups.
The first Chinese-made anti-aircraft machine guns were structurally similar to Soviet models created in the first post-war years. But as their own engineering school and industrial and technological base formed in the PRC, original models of ZPUs began to appear, not copied from Soviet analogues. Subsequently, there were even more Chinese models of 12,7–14,5 mm caliber, used in local conflicts around the world, than large-caliber machine guns supplied by the Soviet Union and Russia.
Chinese anti-aircraft machine guns based on DShKM.
After the formation of the People’s Republic of China, the People’s Liberation Army was armed with Japanese and American-made anti-aircraft machine guns taken as trophies from the Imperial Japanese Army and the Kuomintang troops. However, after the introduction of a contingent of “Chinese People’s Volunteers” to the Korean Peninsula and active participation in the war, the question of saturating them with military and object air defense systems arose.
In parallel with the 37mm and 85mm anti-aircraft guns, the USSR donated a significant number of 12,7mm DShK machine guns to the PRC, which proved themselves very well in combat and were in high demand.
12,7-mm ZPUs, consolidated into anti-aircraft machine-gun companies, usually covered troop concentration areas, battalion and regimental level headquarters, warehouses, transport hubs, and small bridges. They were also part of separate anti-aircraft artillery divisions, equipped with 12 37-mm rapid-fire artillery machine guns and 4 12,7 mm machine guns…READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (en.topwar.ru)
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