Type 920 Daishandao Hospital Ship - Background
By the seventeenth century, vessels especially configured to care for the wounded following engagements at sea routinely accompanied naval squadrons. Pictet noted that by the time of the Crimean War (1853-56) "more than 100,000 sick and wounded were repatriated to England on board hospital transports. Thereafter, no military expedition was ever undertaken without the necessary ships being assigned to evacuate soldiers from the combat area and give them the medical treatment they might require."
It was not until 1868, however, that the international community sought to cloak ships engaged exclusively in the care and treatment of the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked with formal immunity from capture and destruction. Following adoption of the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in the Armies in the Field of 1864, a diplomatic conference was convened in Geneva for the purpose, among others, of extending to naval forces at sea the protections accorded in that treaty to wounded combatants on land. That effort produced a convention entitled Additional Articles Relating to the Condition of the Wounded in War of 1868,which was never ratified but set forth basic precepts that continue to inform the law of armed conflict relative to hospital ships.
Before the appearance of PLA's new Type 920 hospital ship, the PLA did not have any specially designed dedicated hospital ships in its fleets. Since the Paracel Islands Conflict in 1974 between China and South Vietnam navies, the PLA Navy noticed the hospital ship's importance in modern naval warfare. But economic constraints made the building hospital ship by converting other ships as the first step. In 1990, a Qiongsha Class transport Y832 "Bei Kang" was converted to a medical training ship and a hospital ship and was renamed "Nanyi 09". Later another such ship, either Y833 "Nan Kang" or Y834 "Dong Kang" was converted [not converted by a roll on/roll off ship as some accounts report] and provided to South Sea Fleet. Other ships in a "Nan Yi" sequence are not reported.
Since the CPC leadership called for "Strengthening Military Preparation against Taiwan Island" in the late of 1990s, the PLA Navy entered a period of rapid development. In addition to combat ships, the PLA Navy also built auxiliary military ships.
In 1996, PLA Navy Medical Research Institute successfully developed a "Ship-used Medical Module System" for use on the Shichang (Multirole Aviation Ship). The system is based on international standard container and can quickly set up a fully-functional ship-borne self-contained medical system on civilian ships. Given China's great capabilities in ship-building, the PLA Navy could get sufficient container ships to serve as the supplementary military hospital ship.
The Type 920 Hospital ship is one part of PLA Navy's "Marine Medical Ambulance System" concept. The PLA Navy planned to select some civil 150~500-ton class high performance passenger ships as medical ambulance boat, which would transfer the wounded from the landing zone to the rear large hospital ships. Hi-speed SWATH, Sidewall Hovercraft and Air Cushion Catamaran are options for PLA navy.
The Type 920 is the PLA Navy's first purposely-built hospital ship designed to provide rapid and flexible medical and surgical services at sea. The contractor of the ship is the Guangzhou Shipyard International (GSI). The first hull was launched on 29 August 2007, to be commissioned in late 2008. It joined the two transport-ship converted hospital ships currently being deployed by the PLA Navy.
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