The People's Liberation Army Navy, also known as the People's Navy, PLA Navy or simply Chinese Navy, is the naval warfare branch of the People's Liberation Army, the national military of the People's Republic of China. It is composed of five sub-branches: the Surface Force, the Submarine Force, the Coastal Defense Force, the Marine Corps and the Naval Air Force, with a total strength of 384,000 personnel, including 55,000 marines and 50,000 naval aviation personnel. The PLAN's combat units are deployed among three theater command fleets, namely the North Sea, East Sea and South Sea Fleet, which serve the Northern, Eastern and Southern Theater Command, respectively.

The PLAN was formally established on 23 April 1949 and traces its lineage to maritime fighting units during the Chinese Civil War, including many elements of the Republic of China Navy which had defected. Until the late 1980s, the PLAN was largely a riverine and littoral force (brown-water navy) mostly in charge of coastal defense and patrol against potential Nationalist amphibious invasions and territorial waters disputes in the East and South China Sea (roles that are now largely relegated to the paramilitary China Coast Guard), and had been traditionally a maritime support subordinate to the PLA Ground Force. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese leadership were freed from overland border concerns with the northern neighbor and shifted towards more forward-oriented foreign and national security policies in the 1990s, and the PLAN leaders were able to advocate for renewed attention toward limited command of the seas as a green-water navy operating in the marginal seas within the range of coastal air parity.

Into the 21st century, Chinese military officials have outlined plans to operate with blue water capability between the first and second island chains, with Chinese strategists talking about the modernization of the PLAN into "a regional blue-water defensive and offensive navy." Transitioning into a blue-water navy, regular naval exercises and patrols have increased in the Taiwan Strait, the Senkaku Islands/Diaoyutai in the East China Sea, and within the nine-dash line in the South China Sea, and all of which China claims as its territory despite the Republic of China (ROC, i.e. Taiwan), Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines each also claiming a significant part of the South China Sea. Some exercises and patrols of the PLAN in recent years went as close to and within the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Japan, Taiwan, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, although undisputed territorial waters have been not been crossed except in cases of innocent passage.

As of 2024^[update], the PLAN is the second-largest navy in the world by total displacement tonnage — at 2 million tons in 2024, behind only the United States Navy (USN) — and the largest navy globally by number of active sea-going ships (excluding coastal missile boats, gunboats and minesweepers) with over 370 surface ships and submarines in service, compared to approximately 292 ships and submarines in the USN. However, the Chinese fleets are much newer and smaller in tonnage, as about 70% of their warships were launched after 2010 and consist mostly of newly designed destroyers, frigates and corvettes with only a few amphibious warfare ships and the three commissioned aircraft carriers, while only about 25% of the American ships were launched after 2010 and majority of their tonnage are from its eleven 100,000-ton supercarriers, 21 large amphibious assault ships and experimental capital ships such as the Zumwalt-class destroyers. The dominance of Chinese shipbuilding capacity (over 230 times greater tonnage than the United States, according to the Alliance for American Manufacturing) have led the Office of Naval Intelligence to project that China will have 475 battle force ships by 2035 while the USN will have 305 to 317, which would put the United States in a numerical and operational disadvantage especially in the West Pacific according to a chair naval strategy professor at the Naval War College.

The PLAN traces its lineage to units of the Republic of China Navy (ROCN) who defected to the People's Liberation Army towards the end of the Chinese Civil War. A number of Japanese and Manchukuo Imperial Navy gunboats used to patrol the river border with the Soviet Union were also handed over to the PLA following the surrender of Japan. In 1949, Mao Zedong asserted that "to oppose imperialist aggression, we must build a powerful navy". During the Landing Operation on Hainan Island, the communists used wooden junks fitted with mountain guns as both transport and warships against the ROCN. The navy was established on 23 April 1949 by consolidating regional naval forces under Joint staff Department command in Jiangyan (now in Taizhou, Jiangsu).

The Naval Academy was set up at Dalian on 22 November 1949, mostly with Soviet instructors. It then consisted of a motley collection of ships and boats acquired from the Kuomintang forces. The Naval Air Force was added two years later. By 1954, an estimated 2,500 Soviet naval advisers were in China—possibly one adviser to every thirty Chinese naval personnel—and the Soviet Union began providing modern ships.

With Soviet assistance, the navy reorganized in 1954 and 1955 into the North Sea Fleet, East Sea Fleet, and South Sea Fleet, and a corps of admirals and other naval officers was established from the ranks of the ground forces. In shipbuilding the Soviets first assisted the Chinese, then the Chinese copied Soviet designs without assistance, and finally the Chinese produced vessels of their own design. Eventually Soviet assistance progressed to the point that a joint Sino-Soviet Pacific Ocean fleet was under discussion.

Through the upheavals of the late 1950s and 1960s the Navy remained relatively undisturbed. Under the leadership of Minister of National Defense Lin Biao, large investments were made in naval construction during the frugal years immediately after the Great Leap Forward. During the Cultural Revolution, a number of top naval commissars and commanders were purged.