QLZ-87

China's first indigenous automatic grenade launcher — a gas-operated 35mm weapon that provides squad-level suppressive fire and has proliferated across conflict zones from Sudan to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Overview

The QLZ-87, formally the Type 87 automatic grenade launcher, is a Chinese-designed, crew-portable automatic grenade launcher (AGL) that entered People’s Liberation Army service in the mid-1990s. It fires a proprietary 35×32mm high-velocity grenade from a drum magazine, delivering sustained suppressive fire against personnel and light armour out to about 600 metres, and serves as the baseline of China’s broad 35mm grenade ecosystem alongside later belt-fed and precision launchers.

Development

Development began in 1982 under the Hunan ordnance complex (Factory 9596/Zijiang) and the Xianfeng design consortium, aiming to field an indigenous AGL that matched the weight and firepower of Soviet and Western analogues without depending on foreign calibres. The system was formally adopted in February 1996 and was first seen publicly a year later with the PLA garrison in Hong Kong, according to a 2010 NDIA presentation by Chinese ordnance engineer Juanjuan Yang and the detailed ARES research note on the weapon Yang, NDIA 2010 ARES, 2014. Production figures remain not publicly established, but the QLZ-87 quickly became the standard PLA squad-level AGL.

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