Type 99 Tank

The Type 99 is a Chinese main battle tank developed by China's state defense industry and introduced into People's Liberation Army service in the late 1990s and 2000s as an evolution of the earlier Soviet-influenced Type 96 tank lineage, representing a major advance in Chinese domestic armored vehicle design. It mounts a 125-millimeter smoothbore main gun, similar in caliber and general layout to contemporary Russian tank guns, and is protected by layered composite armor supplemented on many vehicles by explosive reactive armor blocks intended to defeat modern shaped-charge anti-tank warheads before they can penetrate the tank's main hull. As China's most advanced mass-produced tank of its era, the Type 99 has been treated by military analysts as a benchmark for the modernization of Chinese ground forces and as a rough contemporary counterpart to advanced Russian and Western main battle tank designs of the same period.