On October 1, 1949, just past three in the afternoon, the new People’s Republic of China formally announced itself to the world. Mao Zedong stood on the rostrum at Tiananmen Gate, read the proclamation, and watched the first National Day parade march past.

Then the aircraft came over. Seventeen planes — a borrowed mongrel collection of leftover Japanese and American types. Among them, leading the formation, two American P-51 Mustangs, ROCAF roundels painted over with the brand-new red star of the PLA. The pilot of one of them was a 21-year-old half-Russian, half-Chinese orphan named Lin Hu.

Within four years he would be a Korean War combat veteran with a Sabre kill to his name. Within forty years he would be deputy commander of an air force he had helped invent.

The Improbable Foundation Pilot

Lin Hu’s story should not have happened. His parents died before he was old enough to remember either of them — a half-Russian boy in pre-war China, fluent in two languages, with no family and no connections. He drifted through the Sino-Japanese War as a refugee, joined the PLA in his teens, and stumbled into pilot training in 1948 because the new air force needed bodies and he could be taught.

The PLAAF was founded on 11 November 1949 — six weeks after the People’s Republic itself. Its founding equipment was a museum: captured Japanese trainers, surrendered ROCAF P-51s and P-47s, a handful of American C-46 transports left behind by the Nationalists. Lin Hu graduated as a fighter pilot in 1949 and was almost immediately assigned to the most prestigious flying mission anywhere in the new country.

On October 1, 1949, Lin Hu’s P-51 was one of seventeen aircraft flown over Tiananmen during the founding ceremony. The PLA Air Force did not yet exist as a formal organisation. The aircraft over Tiananmen flew under the PLA banner. The radio frequencies were ad hoc. Four of the seventeen aircraft were live-armed in case of Nationalist air interception — there was, in October 1949, no realistic way to defend a National Day parade from the air.

Korea: Where Lin Hu Earned His Reputation

In 1950 the Korean War broke out. By 1951 the PLAAF had transitioned from museum aircraft to Soviet MiG-15s, supplied by Stalin and flown — for the first three years of the war — alongside Soviet pilots who were not officially supposed to be there. Lin Hu was sent in as a deputy regiment commander. He flew MiG-15s out of bases in northeast China, dogfighting USAF F-86 Sabres over the Yalu River.

His personal combat record is two engagements: one F-86 Sabre destroyed, one damaged. By the standards of fighter aces these are modest numbers. By the standards of Chinese aviation history they are foundational. He was one of the first Chinese pilots to score a confirmed kill against the best American jet fighter of the era.

“The first Chinese pilots over Korea were children with new machines facing American veterans with old ones. They learned the trade in combat — and the institutional habits they built carried the PLAAF through the next forty years.”

The Career Behind the Combat Record

Lin Hu’s flying career produced one combat kill. His staff career produced something rather more important: the institutional structure of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. He rose through the postwar 1950s and 1960s, surviving the Cultural Revolution’s purges, the Sino-Soviet split, and the long lean years when the PLAAF could not afford to fly modern aircraft.

By 1985 he was Lieutenant General and Deputy Commander of the PLAAF, serving under Commander Wang Hai — another Korean War combat veteran. Together they oversaw the PLAAF’s first transition toward modern doctrine: better training, more flight hours, a serious effort to learn from Western air-combat developments through quiet study of US Air Force publications.

The PLAAF that the world watches today — the J-20s, the J-35, the H-6 bomber fleet, the increasingly aggressive cross-Strait flying — sits on institutional foundations laid by Lin Hu’s generation. The eight-engine VTOL fighter prototypes, the Sichuan-class drone carriers, the J-35AE sales to Pakistan — none of it happens without the boring 1980s work of turning the PLAAF from a Cold War curiosity into a professional service.

The Pilot Who Flew Through Three Eras of China

Lin Hu died in 2018, age 90. He had flown a P-51 over Mao’s proclamation, dogfighted Sabres over Korea, written training manuals for the PLAAF, helped buy the country’s first Su-27s in the 1990s, and lived long enough to see the J-20 stealth fighter enter service in 2017.

One pilot. Three Chinas. The People’s Republic was born and grew up around him, and at every step of the way he was in the cockpit or in the operations centre. The aviation history of the PRC has very few founding figures whose careers span the entire arc. Lin Hu is one of them — and almost nobody outside China has heard his name.

Sources: Wikipedia (Lin Hu, general); PLAAF official histories; Air & Space Forces Magazine “Russians in MiG Alley”; Chinese aviation historical writings.