Miracle campaign: The liberation of Hainan Island

Fu Shihe [Photo by Ma Zhiping/ chinadaily.com.cn]

"The aspirations for liberation of the local people on the island was an important factor that cannot be ignored in ensuring the success of the liberation of Hainan," said Zhong Yechang, chairman of the Hainan Federation of Social Sciences, in his work entitled Decoding the Liberation of Hainan Island.

About a month after the liberation, the Korean War broke out on June 25. The 40th Army, one of the main forces in the sea-crossing operation, became one of the first units to join that conflict. On June 27, the seventh fleet of the United States cut off the Taiwan Straits, according to an official history documentary.

The campaign was of great historical and practical significance to the country, said Mao Zhihua, director of the CPC History Research Office under the CPC's Hainan provincial committee.

He said: "For New China, the campaign of liberating Hainan Island was a large-scale amphibious campaign launched under the strategic eye of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and Chairman Mao Zedong, which smashed the maritime deployment of counterattack against the mainland by the KMT authorities and its delusion of turning Hainan into a second Taiwan. It made Hainan a national defense outpost in the South China Sea."

He said that it made the people of Hainan masters of the island and started a new chapter by stepping onto the road of socialist prosperity.