The material basis for building up a modernized people’s army and consolidating national defense lies in modernized weapons and equipment. In the early days of New China, some of the army’s weapons and equipment were domestically made, while the majority of them had been seized from battlefields. Although there were some arms factories in China at that time, they were small with backward technologies and low production capacity, and therefore unable to satisfy the army’s demands.

Under such circumstances, China imported large quantities of weapons and equipment from the Soviet Union. In 1953, the first 5-year Plan began implementation. China regarded the development of the national defense industries and defense science and technology as an important task, and successively built and expanded 79 relatively large ordnance factories. Meanwhile, weapons and equipment were produced in large numbers copying the technical data from the Soviet Union. In 1956, China successfully produced a Mig-17 jet plane (J-5). At the National Day military parade of 1957, domestically-made Il-28 jet bombers and J-5 fighters were reviewed for the first time. When they flew over Tiananmen Square, they attracted the attention of hundreds of millions of people.