◆ The .303 British cartridge had a rimmed base. It was a relic of the black-powder era, and the British stubbornly held on to it through both world wars before the Americans finally pressured them into switching to the 7.62mm NATO rimless cartridge.

The reason was simple: completely replacing your most commonplace ammunition was prohibitively expensive. You could only keep muddling along on the wrong path until it became impossible not to change.

From this alone, one can see that since the Boer War, the once-mighty world hegemon that was the British Empire had been reduced to a pauper much like the Russians.

◆ Before the Second World War, during China's campaign to recover Taiwan, the Chinese Type 31 assault rifle was already being issued in limited quantities for battlefield testing.

But during the Second World War itself, the European theater still saw mainly bolt-action and semi-automatic rifles. Assault rifles were rare.

Semi-automatic rifles were just beginning to appear in Europe on a large scale, leaving a deep impression: with such a fast-firing weapon, one soldier could do the work of two or three.

The scale of the war was simply too enormous. Even the deep-pocketed Americans had only just finished universally issuing semi-automatic rifles.

As for equipping every soldier with a fully automatic assault rifle and letting millions upon millions of men blaze away — logistics simply could not sustain it.

At the time, the Soviet Union also had its own domestically developed 7.62×39mm M43 assault rifle cartridge. They later discovered that the Type 40 assault rifles supplied by the Chinese comrades used a 7mm caliber round that was somewhat lighter, with better ballistic coefficients and lethality.

The earliest Soviet assault rifle — Fedorov's M1916 — had used a 6.5mm cartridge. The Soviet comrades discussed the matter and concluded that 7.62mm was still too large. They decided to simply adopt the Chinese cartridge standard across the board.

After the Second World War, in the global anti-colonialist wars, the intermediate-power Type 40 assault rifle cartridge began appearing on the stage en masse.

◆ After WWII, due to American insistence on bullet power, NATO spent another twenty years using the full-power 7.62mm rifle cartridge. (American arms manufacturers were the masterminds behind this.) The result was that the so-called "automatic rifles" — the M14 and FAL — were effectively semi-automatic weapons: when fired on full auto, God only knew where the third, fourth, and subsequent rounds would go. Eventually, when many of these rifles were issued, the full-auto function was simply omitted, rendering them incapable of functioning as automatic rifles at all.

For a soldier, an M14 or FAL compared to the M1 Garand his father had carried offered no meaningful improvement besides a more convenient magazine change.

It was not until the M16 appeared in the African wars and went head-to-head with the Type 40 assault rifle that true assault rifles began their real ascendancy. And yet the M14, converted into a semi-automatic designated marksman rifle, continued to serve for decades more.

In every Soviet infantry squad, there was one — sometimes several — similar semi-automatic sniper rifles chambered in full-power cartridges. These were Soviet modifications of the Type 36.

◆ By the time the Type 36 rifle was being designed, the standard individual weapon for Chinese infantry had already been confirmed as an intermediate-power assault rifle. Rifles chambered in full-power cartridges would largely be designed as backup sniper rifles and long-range precision weapons.

From this perspective, abandoning the widely used gas-operated action made it easy to convert the barrel to a free-floating heavy barrel for improved accuracy.

And by discarding the gas system, the barrel required no gas port. There was no need for a small, heat-resistant, pressure-resistant, corrosion-resistant, easy-to-clean piston system — which eliminated a great deal of complexity.

A delayed-blowback system like those in the French FAMAS and German G3 could also achieve structural simplicity and basic reliability. But to aid extraction, the chamber had to be fluted with vertical grooves, which deformed the spent casings after firing. This was unfavorable for reloading, which could be problematic for guerrilla forces with limited ammunition supplies.

The Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army had a tradition of reloading spent brass to save on military expenditure. When Chinese advisors saw Korean guerrillas failing to collect spent casings, many comrades took issue. Firing one shot and discarding a perfectly good casing was simply unacceptable to the frugal People's Army.

Additionally, in a delayed-blowback system, hot propellant gases inevitably leaked into the receiver, which was detrimental to reliability. The M16's direct-impingement system suffered from the same problem.

The inertia system ultimately adopted by the Chinese Black Gun was exceptionally simple, with an extremely small number of parts.

(The prototype for the Chinese Black Gun was the Italian Benelli M1 shotgun.)

◆ Any modern industrial nation can easily study, reverse-engineer, and improve upon a rifle's operating system.

The true advantage of the Type 36 semi-automatic rifle lay in its extensive use of fiberglass-reinforced engineering plastics, fully leveraging the advanced state of China's polymer and chemical industry.

Simplicity is good. Engineering plastics are good. After protracted and arduous research and testing, once the rifle design was finalized, over a dozen modern, well-managed Chinese factories working in concert could easily produce five million rifles for the Soviet Union in half a year — with a complimentary one billion rounds of ammunition. And the engineering-plastic Chinese Black Gun performed superbly on the battlefield.

In a sense, this was one enormous advertisement for Chinese steel and plastics.

◆ American and British soldiers loved the Chinese Black Guns they captured.

Twenty-some years later, that love turned to profound dread. The old Chinese rifle, improved and repurposed, found new roles.

Soldiers feared the African guerrillas' Type 40 assault rifles. But they believed their own training was better, their marksmanship more accurate, their automatic rifles more powerful with longer range and superior precision — and they knew their support firepower vastly exceeded the enemy's.

Then they discovered that Chinese-made entrenching tools, "Three Noes" mortars (no smoke, no flash, no sound), rocket launchers, subsonic ammunition, and suppressed sniper variants of the Black Gun were appearing in large quantities across the vast African continent.

◆ Trained guerrilla fighters would organize ambushes along the colonial army's line of advance.

They knew the terrain intimately. They would dig extremely well-concealed positions at suitable locations, forming a large inverted-triangle ambush zone, then patiently wait for the enemy to walk into the kill zone.

The ambushers would typically open with several mortar rounds to disrupt every enemy soldier's hearing, or concentrate rocket fire to destroy the enemy's vehicles.

Then, from concealed positions, they would use suppressed sniper variants of the Black Gun firing subsonic ammunition and methodically begin picking off the enemy.

The suppressed Black Gun had a low-magnification scope. With subsonic ammunition, its effective range was only 300 meters. It had a thick suppressed barrel and looked ungainly.

But when it fired, there was no muzzle flash. The report was very quiet. From a concealed position, it was extremely difficult to detect — and therefore extremely difficult to suppress with return fire.

Under such crossfire, an infantry platoon could be annihilated in short order. But that was not always the outcome the ambushers sought.

Sometimes the ambushers would methodically wound every person in the column, deliberately not killing anyone.

Sometimes they would kill every white person in the column, then let the locals leave.

Sometimes they would only fire at the "local traitors" in the column — to see whether these people would receive medical aid from the white invaders.

Often the ambushers would kill a few, silently slip away, then silently trail the survivors to the next ambush point and kill a few more.

Facing such vicious "invisible enemies," many American GIs suffered rapid psychological breakdowns.

◆ The suppressed Black Gun was unsuitable for large-scale mechanized offensives. But in "shoot-and-scoot" ambush warfare — in cities, in jungles — guerrilla fighters who knew the terrain used her to devastating effect.

The guerrillas had no fierce firepower, nor could they afford it. They often had no logistics support at all.

But these laborers could be organized. They could be steeled to fight in defense of their homeland. When tens of millions of such volunteers stepped forward, they could exact a devastating toll on the invaders.

Through widespread people's war, guerrilla warfare, and the strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside, many African nations that ultimately won their independence and liberation from colonial rule placed the "Chinese Black Gun" on their national flags.

◆ "Doctor, there is one thing I have never understood: why do you Chinese come here to help us?"

"We are all laborers — we are all working people. Every laborer who joins us makes us a little stronger. And when we are stronger, all of our lives become a little better." The Chinese doctor, Bi Daowen, answered with complete sincerity.