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| Country |
China |
| Type |
Assault rifle |
| Introduction |
1971 |
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The Chinese Type 81 Assault Rifle was the principal automatic rifle used by the People\'s Liberation Army from the mid-1980s until 1995. It incorporates elements of the Dragunov Sniper Rifle, SKS, and AK series rifles. The rifle is cosmetically based on the Type 56/AK-47, but with some significantly different design and improvements to reduce the recoil and muzzle jump, giving better firing accuracy. The Type 81 rifle also made some changes in its external design to make it more user friendly than the original Type 56/AK-47.
Although it is externally similar to the Type 56/AK-47, the Type 81 differs from it significantly. The most easily distinguishable feature is an exposed muzzle part of the barrel. The foresight moved back for a modification to fire rifle grenades from the barrel. There is significant gap between the trigger guard and the magazine on Type 81 rifles, while on the Type 56/AK-47 series the magazine is adjacent to the front of the trigger guard(Its possible this may have been influenced by Walthers version of the MKb.42 of WW2). The Type 81 rifle is a floating-piston gas-operated design, while the Type 56/AK-47 are fixed-piston designs. On Type 81 rifles the obsolete spike-shaped non-detachable bayonet, preferred by the PLA before, was also replaced by the more \"modern\" detachable knife-bayonet. The Type 81 can be fed from the older Type 56 Kalashnikov 30-round magazines, or from 75-round drums intended for the Type 81 light machine gun.
The Type 81 was replaced in PLA frontline service by the QBZ-95, a bullpup rifle chambered for the 5.8x42mm DBP87 cartridge, in 1995 and is now reserved for secondary forces.
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