Chinese People's Volunteer Army order of battle

This is the order of battle for Chinese People's Volunteer Army during major periods of hostilities in the Korean War. After the People's Republic of China entered the Korean War in October 1950 by designating the People's Liberation Army (PLA) North East Frontier Force as the People's Volunteer Army (PVA),^[1] the PVA spent the next two years and nine months in combat operations and five years and three months in garrison duties. Its last elements did not leave Korea until as late as 1958.^[2]

During this period, China paid a huge price for its involvement in the Korean War.^[2] According to Chinese archives, about 73 percent of Chinese infantry forces, 67 percent of Chinese artillery forces, 100 percent of Chinese armored forces and 52 percent of Chinese air forces were deployed in Korea at one point or another, alongside 600,000 civilian laborers – in total more than three million civilian and military personnel.^[2][3] Out of those forces, around 152,000 were killed, 383,500 were wounded, 450,000 were hospitalized, 21,300 were captured and 4,000 were missing. Of the captured 14,190 defected to Taiwan after the ceasefire.^[3] China had also consumed 5.6 million tons of war materiel, 399 aircraft and 12,916 vehicles for its war efforts.^[2] About a third of the Chinese government's annual budget was spent on the military between 1950 and 1953, totaling 10 billion RMB by the war's end.^{[4][nb 1]} All in all, the Korean War was the largest foreign war in Chinese military history, despite the fact that no declaration of war ever existed between China and United Nations forces.^[3]

For many years, historians found it difficult to provide an accurate order of battle for Chinese troops in Korea because most of the information could only be obtained from prisoner interrogations or captured documents. The constant Chinese troop movements and the reattachment of units between different commands further added to the confusion.^[5] By the 1980s, however, a large number of primary documents, memoirs and scholarly works on Chinese involvement in the Korean War began to appear in China, enabling historians to make a more comprehensive and accurate assessment of Chinese military operations during the war.^[6]

As the term "Corps" does not exist in Chinese military terminology, the term "Army" (军) technically means "Corps" in PLA nomenclature, while the term "Army Group" (集团军 or 兵团) means "Army".^[7] For example, the US X Corps is always referred to as the "US 10th Army" (美第10军) among Chinese sources.^[8] As such, this article uses the term "Corps" and "Army" to denote Chinese Army and Army Group formations.

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