depletion of the fishery resources, the civilian fishing vessels must venture much further out into open ocean and staying longer at the sea, thus could no longer afford to stay in home waters and performing the heavy inshore surveying duties previously assigned under the planned economy era in China prior to the Chinese economic reform. Consequently, the PLAN must come up with their own means to meet such huge demand, and converting former gunboats was one of the answers: although these boats can no longer venture out into open ocean and cruise at their maximum speed like they used to do, they are still quite capable of low speed inshore surveying tasks within the confines of river mouths and bays of Chinese coastlines. Contrary to the commonly held but erroneous belief that the PLAN is following the tradition of having weaponry on most of its auxiliaries (though there is certainly some degree of this), the retention of weaponry on these converted boats were mainly to save money: in order to reduce the conversion cost, the original weaponry was retained unless it was absolutely necessary to remove the weapons, thus most of the converted range support and surveying boats still maintained most of their original fighting capability. References Further reading Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Daily report: People's Republic of China, Issues 96-100. National Technical Information Service, 1995. Gunboat classes Gunboats of the People's Liberation Army Navy