The Type 80 general purpose machine gun was a Chinese copy of the Soviet PKMS. The machine gun was certified for design finalisation in 1980 and entered the PLA service in the mid-1980s. The Type 80 was intended as a successor to the Chinese independently developed Type 67/-I/-II, but the weapon only saw limited service with the special operations forces (SOF), possibly due to design flaws.
The Type 80 is a gas-operated, belt-fed automatic weapon that can fire on both the tripod and the foldable bipod attached on the gas tube below the gun barrel. Belts are used from 100-round boxes in the light machine gun (LMG) configurations, and from 200 or 250-round boxes in mounted applications. The machine gun uses an iron sight, but can also be fitted with an optical or night vision sight.
