• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Type 626 Fuzhou Class (Coastal Tanker)

Type 626 tankers in PLAN service are designated by a combination of two Chinese characters followed by three-digit number. The second Chinese character is You, meaning oil in Chinese, or Shui, meaning water, because these ships are classified either as oil and water tankers. The first Chinese character denotes which fleet the ship is service with, with East (Dong) for East Sea Fleet, North (Bei) for North Sea Fleet, and South (Nan) for South Sea Fleet. Thus, Dongyou = East Oil, Nanyou, South Oil, et. However, the pennant numbers may have changed due to the change of Chinese naval ships naming convention.

There is no wiki coverage of this topic apart from a single English language entry. The Chinese wiki has no separate entry from the Type 626 FUZHOU tankers. The English wiki reports seven units - Beiyou 560, Beiyou 563, Dongyou 606, Dongyou 626, Nanyou 940, and Nanyou 941 as Type 632 FULIN units. The provenance of the English langugage wiki entry is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. In conspicuous violation of wiki.rules prohibiting "original research" the article provides only two footnotes. The online Chinese language footnotes is actually to an article about Taiwan's navy, which unsurprisingly provides no information on a Mainland tanker. It seems probable that the entry was prepared byan individual with some direct knowledge of the topic at hand.

But the wiki.article reports that it was updated in April 2019, and calims that 11 units were active as of 2019. The 2015 ONI "China People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA(N)) and Maritime Law Enforcement (MLE) 2015 Recognition And Identification Guide" reported four units in service. It also disagrees with the wiki article, reporting that Dong Shui 643, Dong Shui 644, Dong You 626, Dong You 629, Bei You 573, and Nan Shui 938 are Type 632 FULIN, not Type 626 FUZHOU. The 2018 ONI Guide reported "All FULIN and FUZHOU Oil and Water tankers are believed to the decommissioned by ICOD" [Information Cut Off Date].