People's Liberation Army Special Operations Forces

The PLA first became interested in modern special warfare in the mid-1980s when it was shifting from the "people's war" to "fighting a local war under hi-tech conditions." The PLA planners believed that the next war would be a short, fast-pace conflict on the periphery rather than a total war on Chinese territories, and conventional infantry-orientated ground forces in their mass numbers could no longer meet the requirements.
On 23 December 2008, their publicly known mission is to accompany three Chinese warships in protecting and escorting commercial ships against the Somali pirates, in cooperation with other nations as part a UN mandate.