Gun Problems: Why Russia and China Struggle to Make World-Class Pistols

Making a successful pistol design is hard. Unlike rifles where most moving parts are relatively spaced out, pistols have all their moving parts packed into a small area. The modern trend of trying to stuff more and more ammunition into smaller and smaller guns only exacerbates the difficulty of making a quality design that works right. 

Russia and China have found this out the hard way, having pushed fresh designs into production only for them to fall short in reliability, ergonomic and endurance metrics relative to Western designs. 

Let’s look at some pistol designs from these countries and examine what might have caused these issues. 

Russia’s Pistolet Yarygina (PYa), otherwise known as the MP-443 or Grach, is a design that has suffered a multitude of issues.  

China is suffering similar issues with its primary military and police pistol, the QBZ-92. While information on the domestic variants is scarce, we can extrapolate from the technical specifications given for the export variants of this pistol, the CF-98.