![]() Even though the Chinese military industry tried to get their hands on modern technologies however they could, the isolation left some Chinese technology branches a decade or more behind their Soviet and western counterparts. For the Chinese armor industry, there were several pivotal moments – the 1969 capture of a Soviet T-62 during the Damansky Island incident, the Vietnam War with all its lessons and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war that unveiled a number of issues with the tactics and armor the Chinese deployed. A side-effect of this situation was that the Chinese were left in a bad place, unable to get access to advanced Soviet technologies while being alienated from the west at the same time due to their support of communist regimes in Asia and the Vietnam War. Due to their ideological differences, the relations between China and the Soviet Union deteriorated in the 1960s practically to the point of open conflict. The second era mostly covers the Sino-Soviet split. By the time they reached China, these tanks were hardly the most powerful ones in the world, but were still quite sufficient for their purposes and taught the Chinese engineers valuable lessons in tank design, influencing the Chinese tank industry for decades to come. As a result of the Soviet help with Chinese arms industry, China received a large number of T-34 tanks (designated Type 58 in Chinese service) followed by a large number of T-54A tanks, which served and were later license-produced under the name of Type 59. ![]() The first one is the Soviet friendship era where the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union were allies. There are four basic eras that the Chinese tank development can be divided into – not counting the pre-war period, the wartime period and the Civil War aftermath of the war where all sides used mostly pre-war, lend-leased or captured equipment. ![]() This month in our Branch of the Month series is dedicated to the Chinese Main Battle Tank branch, available in Zhang Feng’s vehicle pool. ![]()
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