He Long

Biography

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. A cowherd during his youth, He received no formal education. At age 20, he killed a local government tax assessor who had killed his uncle for defaulting on taxes. He fled and became an outlaw, giving rise to the legend that he began his revolutionary career with just two kitchen knives. He gained a reputation as a 'Robin Hood-like figure' and his signature weapon was a butcher knife. Around 1918, he raised a volunteer revolutionary army aligned with a local Hunan warlord, and in 1920 his personal army joined the National Revolutionary Army. In 1923 he was promoted to command the Nationalist Twentieth Army. In 1925 he ran a school for training Kuomintang soldiers, where he became close with students who were CCP members. During the 1926 Northern Expedition, he commanded the 1st Division, 9th Corps of the National Revolutionary Army under Zhang Fakui. In late 1926 he joined the CCP, though the Communist Party Members Website says he only joined at the end of August or beginning of September 1927, after allegedly sending up to 70 requests. In 1927, after Wang Jingwei's leftist Kuomintang government collapsed and Chiang Kai-shek suppressed communists, He left the Kuomintang and joined the Communists, commanding the 20th Corps, 1st Column of the Red Army. He and Zhu De planned and led the main force of the Nanchang Uprising in 1927, commanding 24,000 men. They could not secure the city against the inevitable Kuomintang counterattack. The campaign suffered logistical difficulties, and the Communists suffered 50% casualties in two months. Most of He's surviving soldiers surrendered, deserted, or rejoined the KMT. Only 2,000 survivors returned to fight for the Communists in 1928 when Zhu reformed his forces in Hunan. After defeat, He fled to Lufeng, Guangdong, spent time in Hong Kong, then was sent by the CCP to Shanghai and Wuhan. Chiang Kai-shek continuously tried to persuade him to rejoin the Kuomintang but failed. After the Nanchang Uprising, He turned down an offer by the CCP Central Committee to study in Russia and returned to Hunan, raising a new force in 1930. His force controlled a broad area of the Hunan-Hubei border region around Lake Hong and organized it into a rural soviet. In mid-1932, Kuomintang forces targeted his soviet as part of the Fourth Encirclement Campaign. He's forces abandoned their bases, moved southwest, and established a new base in Northeast Guizhou in mid-1933. In 1934, Ren Bishi joined He in Guizhou with his own surviving forces. They merged, with He as military commander and Ren as commissar. He joined the Long March in November 1935, over a year after Zhu De and Mao Zedong's forces evacuated their Jiangxi soviet. His ability to resist the Kuomintang was partly due to his position on the periphery of Communist territory. On the Long March, He's forces met Zhang Guotao's forces in June 1936, but both He and Ren disagreed with Zhang about the direction of the march, and He led his forces into Shaanxi to join Mao by end of 1936. During this period he repeatedly thwarted Chiang's plans to annihilate his army. In 1937, He settled his troops in Northwestern Shaanxi and established a new headquarters. Because the Second Army of the Chinese Red Army under his command was one of the few Communist forces to arrive in Yan'an mostly intact, his force assumed responsibility for protecting the new capital. When the Red Army was reorganized into the Eighth Route Army in 1937, He commanded the 120th Division and was assigned the rank of Lieutenant General by the National Revolutionary Army. From late 1938 to 1940, he fought both the Japanese army and Kuomintang-affiliated guerrillas in Hubei. In 1943 he was promoted to overall commander of Communist forces in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia. By end of World War II, he commanded approximately 175,000 troops across Northwestern China. His most notable subordinates included Zhang Zongxun, Xu Guangda, and Peng Shaohui. He was successful in expanding Communist base areas throughout WWII, partly due to social confusion from Japan's Ichi-Go Offensive. He frequently expanded Communist areas by allying with local independent guerrilla forces fighting the Japanese. His experience fighting the Kuomintang and Japanese led him to question Mao's unconditional emphasis on ideological guerrilla warfare at the expense of conventional tactics. In October 1945, one month after Japanese surrender, command of his forces transferred to Peng Dehuai 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 around Yan'an. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, he was elected to the CCP Central Committee. He became a leading figure in mobilizing cadres to work in other regions when the Civil War resumed. Near the end of the Civil War, he was made Director of the Xi'an Military Control Commission and promoted to command the First Field Army active in Southwest China. As part of the Southwest Bureau's leadership, he was one of the leaders behind its operations.