Editing He Long (section)

===In the People's Republic===
[[File:Nie Rongzhen, He Long, Luo Ronghuan on Tian'anmen.jpg|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 [[Yuan Shuai|Ten Marshals]] in 1955,<ref name="CW163" /> and he served in a number of civilian positions. He was made [[Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China|Vice Premier]]. He headed the [[State General Administration of Sports|National Sports Commission]], and in that role facilitated sports exchanges with the Soviet Union and the eastern European countries.<ref name=":Minami">{{Cite book |last=Minami |first=Kazushi |title=People's Diplomacy: How Americans and Chinese Transformed US-China Relations during the Cold War |date=2024 |publisher=[[Cornell University Press]] |isbn=9781501774157 |location=Ithaca, NY}}</ref>{{Rp|page=139}} 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]].<ref name="L4950" />

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.<ref>Rice 185-186</ref> Peng was partially rehabilitated in 1965, but then purged again at the beginning of the [[Cultural Revolution]] 1966.<ref>Domes 116-117</ref> He was accused of a mutiny in Feb 1964, after a Soviet Union trip with Zhou Enlai. The Soviet were unhappy, with China direction. Cultural revolution followed soon after, to purged communist and rightist leanings in China.  

[[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.<ref name="CIAII">''Central Intelligence Agency'' ii</ref> He's persecutors singled him out by labeling him the "biggest bandit".<ref name="CW163" /> He was the second highest-ranking member of the Military Affairs Commission at the time that he was purged, and the method in which he and those close to him were purged set the pattern for multiple later purges of the PLA leadership throughout the Cultural Revolution.<ref name="CIAII" />

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.<ref>Chung 391</ref> He died in 1969 after being hospitalized for the severe malnutrition that he developed while under house arrest. He died soon after being admitted to hospital, after a glucose injection complicated his chronic diabetes.<ref>''The Cambridge History of China'' 213</ref>

He was posthumously partially rehabilitated by Mao in 1974, then fully rehabilitated after [[Deng Xiaoping]] came to power in the late 1970s.{{cn|date=April 2024}} A [[Helong Sports Center Stadium|stadium]] in [[Changsha]] was named after him in 1987.