He Long (; March 22, 1896 – June 9, 1969) was a Chinese Communist revolutionary and a Marshal of the People's Republic of China. He was from a poor rural family in Hunan, and his family was not able to provide him with any formal education. He began his revolutionary career after avenging the death of his uncle, when he fled to become an outlaw and attracted a small personal army around him. Later, his forces joined the Kuomintang, and he participated in the Northern Expedition.
He rebelled against the Kuomintang after Chiang Kai-shek began violently suppressing Communists, when he planned and led the unsuccessful Nanchang Uprising. After escaping, he organized a soviet in rural Hunan (and later Guizhou), but was forced to abandon his bases when pressured by Chiang's Encirclement Campaigns. He joined the Long March in 1935, over a year after forces associated with Mao Zedong and Zhu De were forced to do so. He met with forces led by Zhang Guotao, but he disagreed with Zhang about the strategy of the Red Army and led his forces to join and support Mao.
After settling and establishing a headquarters in Shaanxi, He led guerrilla forces in Northwest China in both the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, and was generally successful in expanding areas of Communist control. He commanded a force of 170,000 troops forces by the end of 1945, when his force was placed under the command of Peng Dehuai and He became Peng's second-in-command. He was placed in control of Southwest China in the late 1940s, and spent most of the 1950s in the Southwest administering the region in both civilian and military roles.
He held a number of civilian and military positions after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. In 1955, his contributions to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party were recognized when he was named one of the Ten Marshals, and he served as China's vice premier. He did not support Mao Zedong's attempts to purge Peng Dehuai in 1959 and attempted to rehabilitate Peng. After the Cultural Revolution was declared in 1966, he was one of the first leaders of the PLA to be purged. He died in 1969 when a glucose injection provided by his jailers complicated his untreated diabetes.
Biography
Early life
thumb|left|150px|He Long in his youth
thumb|left|200px|He in 1925.
He Long was a member of the Tujia ethnic group. Born in Sangzhi, Hunan, he and his siblings, including He Ying, grew up in a poor peasant household, despite his father being a minor Qing military officer. His father was a member of the Gelaohui (Elder Brother Society), a secret society dating back to the early Qing dynasty. A cowherd during his youth, he received no formal education. When He was 20, he killed a local government tax assessor who had killed his uncle for defaulting on his taxes. He then fled and became an outlaw, giving rise to the legend that he began his revolutionary career with just two kitchen knives. In 1923, He was promoted to command the Nationalist Twentieth Army. In 1925, He ran a school for training Kuomintang soldiers. While running this school, He became close with some of his students who were also Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members. He served under Zhang Fakui during the Northern Expedition. In 1927, after the collapse of Wang Jingwei's leftist Kuomintang government in Wuhan and Chiang Kai-shek's suppression of communists, He left the Kuomintang and joined the Communists, commanding the 20th Corps, 1st Column of the Red Army.
After his forces were defeated, He fled to Lufeng, Guangdong. He spent some time in Hong Kong, but was later sent by the CCP to Shanghai, then to Wuhan.
In 1934, Ren Bishi joined He in Guizhou with his own surviving forces after also being forced to abandon his Soviet in another Encirclement Campaign. Ren and He merged forces, with He becoming the military commander and Ren becoming the commissar. He joined the Long March in November 1935, over a year after forces led by Zhu De and Mao Zedong were forced to evacuate their own Soviet in Jiangxi. In 1937, He settled his troops in Northwestern Shaanxi and established a new headquarters there. From late 1938 to 1940, He fought both the Japanese army and Kuomintang-affiliated guerrillas in Hubei.
He was successful in expanding Communist base areas throughout the period of World War II. Part of He's success was due to the social confusion caused by Japan's Ichi-Go Offensive in the areas of China that Japanese operations effected. He was frequently able to expand Communist areas of operation by allying with local, independent guerrilla forces who were also fighting the Japanese. He's experience fighting the Kuomintang and the Japanese led him to question Mao's unconditional emphasis on the importance of ideological guerrilla warfare at the expense of conventional tactics and military organization.
In October 1945, one month after the Japanese surrender, the command of He's forces was transferred to Peng Dehuai, which operated as the "Northwest Field Army". He became Peng's second-in-command, but spent most of the rest of the Chinese Civil War in central CCP headquarters, in and around Yan'an. Near the end of the Chinese Civil War, He was made Director of the Xi'an Military Control Commission, and promoted to command the First Field Army, which was active in Southwest China. His "slow first, fast later" approach facilitated conditions for a decisive Communist victory in Chengdu. After the Communists won the Civil War in 1949, He spent most of the 1950s in both civilian and military roles in the Southwest, most notably as Vice Chairman of the Southwest Military and Political Committee. In this position, he made crucial appointments that shaped the military and political landscape of several provinces, including in bandit suppression efforts.
In the People's Republic
thumb|He Long (center) with Marshals [[Nie Rongzhen (left) and Luo Ronghuan at Tiananmen (1959)]]
He's military accomplishments were recognized when he was promoted to being one of the Ten Marshals in 1955, He Long had had prior experience in organizing sports competitions since the Red Army period, and in 1951, established the earliest professional sports team established nationwide after the Civil War, facing pressure in appointing instructors and coaches who had worked under the Kuomintang. He was one of the most well-traveled members of the CCP elite, and led numerous delegations abroad, meeting with leaders of other Asian countries, the Soviet Union, and East Germany. In developing professional sports, he not only handled major events but also meticulous details. He would watch tennis players at the training facility and then tell the coaches to identify their weaknesses by applying statistical methods. Facing a shortage of sports venues and technical personnel, he embarked on constructing new ones, launching campaigns and creating principles for development, inducing overseas talents to return, and establishing newspapers and magazines to focus on reporting sporting events. He implemented radio calisthenics, resulting in a general improvement in students' physical fitness, and took the lead in the popularization of sports in rural areas. During the Third Front construction movement, He Long, as a member of the Politburo, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission and Vice Premier, went on inspection tours to China’s interior.
After Mao Zedong purged Peng Dehuai in 1959, Mao appointed He to the head of an office to investigate Peng's past and find reasons to criticize Peng. He accepted the position but was sympathetic to Peng, and stalled for over a year before submitting his report. Mao's prestige weakened when it became widely known that Mao's Great Leap Forward had been a disaster, and He eventually presented a report that was positive, and which attempted to vindicate Peng. Peng was partially rehabilitated in 1965, but then purged again at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The Soviets were unhappy with China's direction, and in a meeting, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet Defense Minister, had reportedly suggested to Marshal He Long that China remove Mao from leadership.
Fall and death
As the Cultural Revolution began, Jiang Qing denounced He in December 1966 of being a "rightist" and of intra-CCP factionalism. Following Jiang's accusations He and his supporters were branded an anti-CCP element and quickly purged. He Long, then the leading figure among active members of the Central Military Commission, was accused of fermenting a "February Mutiny", which supposedly took place in 1966, with other military and political leaders in China. It was also believed that he had been opposing Lin Biao's military appointments. He's persecutors singled him out by labeling him the "biggest bandit".
After being purged, He was placed under indefinite house arrest for the last two and a half years of his life. He described the conditions of his imprisonment as a period of slow torture, in which his captors "intended to destroy my health so that they can murder me without spilling my blood". During the years that he was imprisoned, his captors restricted his access to water, cut off his house's heat during the winter, and refused him access to medicine to treat his diabetes from January 1969. He Long had suffered from diabetes mellitus for many years. Poor medical treatment manifested his conditions into diabetic acidosis soon after.
He was posthumously partially rehabilitated by Mao in 1974, then fully rehabilitated after Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s. A stadium in Changsha was named after him in 1987.