People's Volunteer Army

The People's Volunteer Army, officially the Chinese People's Volunteers, was the designation for the Chinese communist contingent of armed expeditionary forces that the People's Republic of China deployed during the Korean War. Every unit in it was in fact transferred from the People's Liberation Army on the orders of Mao Zedong, but it was constituted separately and named a volunteer force in order to avoid an official war with the United States. It entered Korea on 19 October 1950 and had completely withdrawn by October 1958. Peng Dehuai was its nominal commander and political commissar until the 1953 ceasefire, with Chen Geng and Deng Hua acting as commander and commissar after April 1952. The first wave of 25 October to 5 November 1950 comprised six corps totalling 250,000 men, and about 3 million Chinese civilian and military personnel served in Korea over the course of the war.