People's Liberation Army

The People's Liberation Army was founded on August 1, 1927, when Communist-led units mutinied against the Republic of China's Nationalist government in the Nanchang Uprising, an event still commemorated as the force's founding date, and subsequently developed under Mao Zedong's leadership through the Chinese Civil War, the Long March, and the resistance against Japanese occupation during World War II before securing the Communist Party's victory over Nationalist forces in 1949. Structured, since a major reorganization in 2016, around five theater commands and services spanning ground forces, the navy, air force, rocket force and strategic support force, the PLA functions as the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party rather than a state military in the conventional Western sense, with the party's Central Military Commission holding ultimate command authority. The PLA fought major twentieth century conflicts including the Korean War, where Chinese forces intervened against United Nations troops in 1950, and a 1979 border war with Vietnam, while undergoing a sustained modernization drive from the 1990s onward that transformed it from a large but technologically outdated force into an increasingly professionalized, technologically advanced military. As of the twenty-first century the PLA is the largest standing military force in the world by active personnel, and its continued modernization, particularly in naval and missile capability, is closely watched as a central factor in the security balance of the Asia-Pacific region.