www.China-Defense.com

The Type 88C MBT is armed with a 125mm smoothbore main gun with auto-loader of Russian design. The use of the auto-loader allowed the tank crew to reduced to 3 men. It's interesting that China already produces a superior 120mm smoothbore tank gun of German design for the Type 89 SPATG. The 125mm gun was selected is probably due to the auto-loader. Unfortunately, battle reports from Desert Storm, Chechnya and Balkan Civil Wars shown that tanks with the similar under the turret Russian style auto-loader had a bad tendency of blowing their turrets off after the armor got penetrated.