Sharecropping

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping 

 

An FSA photo of a cropper family chopping the weeds from cotton near White Plains, in Georgia, US (1941).

 

Sharecropping is when a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land.

Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Some are governed by tradition, and others by law. Legal contract systems such as the Italian mezzadria, the French métayage, the Spanish mediero, the Slavic połowcy,издoльщина or the Islamic system of muqasat, occur widely.

Overview

Sharecropping has benefits and costs for both the owners and the tenant. Everyone encourages the cropper to remain on the land, solving the harvest rush problem. At the same time, since the cropper pays in shares of his harvest, owners and croppers share the risks of harvests being large or small and of prices being high or low. Because tenants benefit from larger harvests, they have an incentive to work harder and invest in better methods than in a slave plantation system. However, by dividing the working force into many individual workers, large farms no longer benefit from economies of scale. On the whole, sharecropping was not as economically efficient as the gang agriculture of slave plantations.

In the U.S., "tenant" farmers owned their own mules and equipment, and "sharecroppers" did not, and thus sharecroppers were poorer and of lower status. Sharecropping occurred extensively in Scotland, Ireland and colonial Africa, and came into wide use in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). The South had been devastated by war – planters had ample land but little money for wages or taxes. At the same time, most of the former slaves could provide labor but had no money or land – they rejected the kind of gang labor that typified slavery. A solution was the sharecropping system focused on cotton, which was the only crop that could generate cash for the croppers, landowners, merchants and the tax collector. Poor white farmers who previously had done little cotton farming needed cash as well and became sharecroppers.

Jeffery Paige made a distinction between centralized sharecropping found on cotton plantations and the decentralized sharecropping with other crops. The former is characterized by political conservatism and long lasting tenure. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. Their work is heavily supervised as slave plantations were. This form of tenure tends to be replaced by wage slavery as markets penetrate. Decentralized sharecropping involves virtually no role for the landlord: plots are scattered, peasants manage their own labor and the landowners do not manufacture the crops. Leases are very short which leads to peasant radicalism. This form of tenure becomes more common when markets penetrate.

Use of the sharecropper system has also been identified in England (as the practice of "farming to halves"). It is still used in many rural poor areas of the world today, notably in Pakistan and India.

Although there is a perception that sharecropping was exploitative, "evidence from around the world suggests that sharecropping is often a way for differently endowed enterprises to pool resources to mutual benefit, overcoming credit restraints and helping to manage risk." According to Dr. Hunter, "a few acres to the cottage would make the labourers too independent."

It can have more than a passing similarity to serfdom or indenture, particularly where associated with large debts at a plantation store that effectively ties down the workers and their family to the land. It has therefore been seen as an issue of land reform in contexts such as the Mexican Revolution. However, Nyambara states that Eurocentric historiographical devices such as 'feudalism' or 'slavery' often qualified by weak prefixes like 'semi-' or 'quasi-' are not helpful in understanding the antecedents and functions of sharecropping in Africa.

Sharecropping agreements can, however, be made fairly, as a form of tenant farming or sharefarming that has a variable rental payment, paid in arrears. There are three different types of contracts.

1. Workers can rent plots of land from the owner for a certain sum and keep the whole crop.
2. Workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner but keep some of the crop.
3. No money changes hands but the worker and land owner each keep a share of the crop.

However, many outside factors make it efficient. One factor is slave emancipation: sharecropping provided the freed slaves of the US, Brazil and the late Roman Empire with land access. It is efficient also as a way of escaping inflation, hence its rise in 16th-century France and Italy.

It also gave sharecroppers a vested interest in the land, incentivizing hard work and care. American plantation were, however, wary of this interest, as they felt that would lead to African Americans demanding rights of partnership. Many black laborers denied the unilateral authority that landowners hoped to achieve, further complicating relations between landowners and sharecroppers.

Landlords opt for sharecropping to avoid the administrative costs and shirking that occurs on plantations and haciendas. It is preferred to cash tenancy because cash tenants take all the risks, and any harvest failure will hurt them and not the landlord. Therefore, they tend to demand lower rents than sharecroppers.

The advantages of sharecropping in other situations include enabling access for women to arable land where ownership rights are vested only in men.

Disadvantages

The practice was harmful to tenants with many cases of high interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often keeping tenant farm families severely indebted. The debt was often compounded year on year leaving the cropper vulnerable to intimidation and shortchanging. Nevertheless, it appeared to be inevitable, with no serious alternative unless the croppers left agriculture.

A new system of credit, the crop lien, became closely associated with sharecropping. Under this system, a planter or merchant extended a line of credit to the sharecropper while taking the year's crop as collateral. The sharecropper could then draw food and supplies all year long. When the crop was harvested, the planter or merchants who held the lien sold the harvest for the sharecropper and settled the debt.

Regions

Africa

In settler colonies of colonial Africa, sharecropping was a feature of the agricultural life. White farmers, who owned most of the land, were frequently unable to work the whole of their farm for lack of capital. They, therefore, had African farmers to work the excess on a sharecropping basis. In South Africa the 1913 Natives' Land Act outlawed the ownership of land by Africans in areas designated for white ownership and effectively reduced the status of most sharecroppers to tenant farmers and then to farm laborers. In the 1960s, generous subsidies to white farmers meant that most farmers could afford to work their entire farms, and sharecropping faded out.

The arrangement has reappeared in other African countries in modern times, including Ghana and Zimbabwe.

United States

Sharecroppers on the roadside after eviction (1936).

Sharecropping became widespread in the South as a response to economic upheaval caused by the end of slavery during and after Reconstruction. Sharecropping was a way for poor farmers, both white and black, to earn a living from land owned by someone else. The landowner provided land, housing, tools and seed, and perhaps a mule, and a local merchant provided food and supplies on credit. At harvest time, the sharecropper received a share of the crop (from one-third to one-half, with the landowner taking the rest). The cropper used his share to pay off his debt to the merchant.

The system started with Black farmers when large plantations were subdivided. By the 1880s, white farmers also became sharecroppers. The system was distinct from that of the tenant farmer, who rented the land, provided his own tools and mule, and received half the crop. Landowners provided more supervision to sharecroppers, and less or none to tenant farmers. Sharecropping in the United States probably originated in the Natchez District, roughly centered in Adams County, Mississippi with its county seat, Natchez.

Sharecroppers worked a section of the plantation independently, usually growing cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and other cash crops, and receiving half of the parcel's output. Sharecroppers also often received their farming tools and all other goods from the landowner they were contracted with. Landowners dictated decisions relating to the crop mix, and sharecroppers were often in agreements to sell their portion of the crop back to the landowner, thus being subjected to manipulated prices. In addition to this, landowners, threatening to not renew the lease at the end of the growing season, were able to apply pressure to their tenants. Sharecropping often proved economically problematic, as the landowners held significant economic control.

Although the sharecropping system was primarily a post-Civil War development, it did exist in antebellum Mississippi, especially in the northeastern part of the state, an area with few slaves or plantations, and most likely existed in Tennessee. Sharecropping, along with tenant farming, was a dominant form in the cotton South from the 1870s to the 1950s, among both blacks and whites.

An early 20th century Texas sharecropper's home diorama at the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum, 2015.

 

Following the Civil War of the United States, the South lay in ruins. Plantations and other lands throughout the South were seized by the federal government, and thousands of former slaves, known as freedmen, found themselves free, yet without means to support their families. The situation was made more complex due to General William T. Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15, which in January 1865, announced he would temporarily grant newly freed families 40 acres of land on the islands and coastal regions of Georgia. This policy was also referred to as Forty Acres and a Mule. Many believed that this policy would be extended to all former slaves and their families as repayment for their treatment at the end of the war. 

An alternative path was selected and enforced. In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson, as one of the first acts of Reconstruction, instead ordered all land under federal control be returned to the owners from whom it had been seized. This meant that plantation and land owners in the South regained their land but lacked a labor force. The solution was sharecropping, which enabled the government to match labor with demand and begin the process of economically rebuilding the nation via labor contracts.

In Reconstruction-era United States, sharecropping was one of few options for penniless freedmen to support themselves and their families. Other solutions included the crop-lien system (where the farmer was extended credit for seed and other supplies by the merchant), a rent labor system (where the former slave rents his land but keeps his entire crop), and the wage system (worker earns a fixed wage, but keeps none of their crop). Sharecropping was by far the most economically efficient, as it provided incentives for workers to produce a bigger harvest. It was a stage beyond simple hired labor because the sharecropper had an annual contract. During Reconstruction, the federal Freedmen's Bureau ordered the arrangements and wrote and enforced the contracts.

After the Civil War, plantation owners had to borrow money to farm, at around 15 percent interest. The indebtedness of cotton planters increased through the early 1940s, and the average plantation fell into bankruptcy about every 20 years. It is against this backdrop that the wealthiest owners maintained their concentrated ownership of the land.

Cotton sharecroppers, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

 

A sharecropper family in Walker County, Alabama (c. 1937)

 

Sharecropper's cabin displayed at Louisiana State Cotton Museum in Lake Providence, Louisiana (2013 photo)

 

Inside living room/bedroom combination of sharecroppers in Lake Providence

 

The commissary or company store for sharecroppers at Lake Providence as it appeared in the 19th century

 

Sharecroppers' chapel at Cotton Museum in Lake Providence

 

Croppers were assigned a plot of land to work, and in exchange owed the owner a share of the crop at the end of the season, usually one half. The owner provided the tools and farm animals. Farmers who owned their own mule and plow were at a higher stage, and were called tenant farmers: They paid the landowner less, usually only a third of each crop. In both cases, the farmer kept the produce of gardens.

The sharecropper purchased seed, tools, and fertilizer, as well as food and clothing, on credit from a local merchant, or sometimes from a plantation store. At harvest time, the cropper would harvest the whole crop and sell it to the merchant who had extended credit. Purchases and the landowner's share were deducted and the cropper kept the difference—or added to his debt.

Though the arrangement protected sharecroppers from the negative effects of a bad crop, many sharecroppers (both black and white) remained quite poor. Arrangements typically left a third of the crop to the sharecropper.

By the early 1930s, there were 5.5 million white tenants, sharecroppers, and mixed cropping/laborers in the United States; and 3 million blacks. In Tennessee, whites made up two thirds or more of the sharecroppers. In Mississippi, by 1900, 36% of all white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, while 85% of black farmers were. In Georgia, fewer than 16,000 farms were operated by black owners in 1910, while, at the same time, African Americans managed 106,738 farms as tenants.

Sharecropping continued to be a significant institution in Tennessee agriculture for more than 60 years after the Civil War, peaking in importance in the early 1930s, when sharecroppers operated approximately one-third of all farm units in the state.

The situation of landless farmers who challenged the system in the rural South as late as 1941 has been described thus: "he is at once a target subject of ridicule and vitriolic denunciation; he may even be waylaid by hooded or unhooded leaders of the community, some of whom may be public officials. If a white man persists in 'causing trouble', the night riders may pay him a visit, or the officials may haul him into court; if he is a Negro, a mob may hunt him down."

Sharecroppers formed unions in the 1930s, beginning in Tallapoosa County, Alabama in 1931, and Arkansas in 1934. Membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union included both blacks and poor whites. As leadership strengthened, meetings became more successful, and protest became more vigorous, landlords responded with a wave of terror.

Sharecroppers' strikes in Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel, the 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers' Strike, were documented in the film Oh Freedom After While. The plight of a sharecropper was addressed in the song Sharecropper's Blues recorded by Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra with vocals by Kay Starr (Decca 24264) in 1944. It was rerecorded and released by Capitol with Starr being backed by the David Beckham Ork" (Capitol Americana 40051). Decca then reissued the Barnet/Star recording.

In the 1930s and 1940s, increasing mechanization virtually brought the institution of sharecropping to an end in the United States. The sharecropping system in the U.S. increased during the Great Depression with the creation of tenant farmers following the failure of many small farms throughout the Dustbowl. Traditional sharecropping declined after mechanization of farm work became economical in the mid-20th century. As a result, many sharecroppers were forced off the farms, and migrated to cities to work in factories, or become migrant workers in the Western United States during World War II.

Sharecropping agreements

Typically, a sharecropping agreement would specify which party was expected to cover certain expenses, like seed, fertilizer, weed control, irrigation district assessments, and fuel. Sometimes the sharecropper covered those costs, but they expected a larger share of the crop in return. The agreement would also indicate whether the sharecropper would use his own equipment to raise the crops, or use the landlord's equipment. The agreement would also indicate whether the landlord would pick up his or her share of the crop in the field or whether the sharecropper would deliver it (and where it would be delivered.)

For example, a landowner may have a sharecropper farming an irrigated hayfield. The sharecropper uses his own equipment, and covers all the costs of fuel and fertilizer. The landowner pays the irrigation district assessments and does the irrigating himself. The sharecropper cuts and bales the hay, and delivers one-third of the baled hay to the landlord's feedlot. The sharecropper might also leave the landlord's share of the baled hay in the field, where the landlord would fetch it when he wanted hay. 

Another arrangement could have the sharecropper delivering the landlord's share of the product to market, in which case the landlord would get his share in the form of the sale proceeds. In that case, the agreement should indicate the timing of the delivery to market, which can have a significant effect on the ultimate price of some crops. The market timing decision should probably be decided shortly before harvest, so that the landlord has more complete information about the area's harvest, to determine whether the crop will earn more money immediately after harvest, or whether it should be stored until the price rises. Market timing can entail storage costs and losses to spoilage for some crops as well.

Farmers' cooperatives

Cooperative farming exists in many forms throughout the world. Various arrangements can be made through collective bargaining or purchasing to get the best deals on seeds, supplies, and equipment. For example, members of a farmers' cooperative who cannot afford heavy equipment of their own can lease them for nominal fees from the cooperative. Farmers' cooperatives can also allow groups of small farmers and dairymen to manage pricing and prevent undercutting by competitors.

Economic theories of share tenancy

The theory of share tenancy was long dominated by Alfred Marshall's famous footnote in Book VI, Chapter X.14 of Principles where he illustrated the inefficiency of agricultural share-contracting. Steven N.S. Cheung (1969), challenged this view, showing that with sufficient competition and in the absence of transaction costs, share tenancy will be equivalent to competitive labor markets and therefore efficient.

He also showed that in the presence of transaction costs, share-contracting may be preferred to either wage contracts or rent contracts—due to the mitigation of labor shirking and the provision of risk sharing. Joseph Stiglitz (1974, 1988), suggested that if share tenancy is only a labor contract, then it is only pairwise-efficient and that land-to-the-tiller reform would improve social efficiency by removing the necessity for labor contracts in the first place.

Reid (1973), Murrel (1983), Roumasset (1995) and Allen and Lueck (2004) provided transaction cost theories of share-contracting, wherein tenancy is more of a partnership than a labor contract and both landlord and tenant provide multiple inputs. It has also been argued that the sharecropping institution can be explained by factors such as informational asymmetry (Hallagan, 1978; Allen, 1982; Muthoo, 1998), moral hazard (Reid, 1976; Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985; Ghatak and Pandey, 2000), intertemporal discounting (Roy and Serfes, 2001), price fluctuations (Sen, 2011) or limited liability (Shetty, 1988; Basu, 1992; Sengupta, 1997; Ray and Singh, 2001).

Class conflict

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict 

The Pyramid of Capitalist System is a simple visualization of class conflict.

 

Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio-economic competition among the social classes.

The forms of class conflict include direct violence, such as wars for resources and cheap labor and assassinations; indirect violence, such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness and unsafe working conditions. Economic coercion, such as the threat of unemployment or the withdrawal of investment capital; or ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political forms of class warfare are: legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery of legislators.

The social-class conflict can be direct, as in a dispute between labour and management, such as an employer's industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect, such as a workers' slowdown of production in protest of unfair labor practices, such as low wages and poor workplace conditions.

In the political and economic philosophies of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting radical social and political changes for the social majority.

Usage

Truck drivers fight the police in the course of the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934

 

Heads of aristocrats on pikes

 

Farmer confronting landlord during Mao Zedong's mass purging of landlords

In political science, socialists and Marxists use the term class conflict to define a social class by its relationship to the means of production, such as factories, agricultural land, and industrial machinery. The social control of labor and of the production of goods and services, is a political contest between the social classes.

The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin said that the class struggles of the working class, the peasantry, and the working poor were central to realizing a social revolution to depose and replace the ruling class, and the creation of libertarian socialism.

Marx's theory of history proposes that class conflict is decisive in the history of economic systems organized by hierarchies of social class, such as capitalism and feudalism. Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the working class is viewed by them as inevitable under plutocratic capitalism.

Pre-capitalist societies

Where societies are socially divided based on status, wealth, or control of social production and distribution, class structures arise and are thus coeval with civilization itself. It is well documented since at least European classical antiquity (Conflict of the Orders, Spartacus, etc.) and the various popular uprisings in late medieval Europe and elsewhere. One of the earliest analysis of these conflicts is Friedrich Engels' The Peasant War in Germany. One of the earliest analyses of the development of class as the development of conflicts between emergent classes is available in Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. In this work, Kropotkin analyzes the disposal of goods after death in pre-class or hunter-gatherer societies, and how inheritance produces early class divisions and conflict.

21st-century United States

In the speech "The Great American Class War" (2013), the journalist Bill Moyers asserted the existence of social-class conflict between democracy and plutocracy in the U.S. Chris Hedges wrote a column for Truthdig called "Let's Get This Class War Started," which was a play on Pink's song "Let's Get This Party Started."

Historian Steve Fraser, author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, asserts that class conflict is an inevitability if current political and economic conditions continue, noting that "people are increasingly fed up… their voices are not being heard. And I think that can only go on for so long without there being more and more outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare."

Capitalist societies

The typical example of class conflict described is class conflict within capitalism. This class conflict is seen to occur primarily between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and takes the form of conflict over hours of work, value of wages, division of profits, cost of consumer goods, the culture at work, control over parliament or bureaucracy, and economic inequality. The particular implementation of government programs which may seem purely humanitarian, such as disaster relief, can actually be a form of class conflict. In the U.S., class conflict is often noted in labor/management disputes. As far back as 1933 representative Edward Hamilton of ALPA, the Airline Pilot's Association, used the term "class warfare" to describe airline management's opposition at the National Labor Board hearings in October of that year. Apart from these day-to-day forms of class conflict, during periods of crisis or revolution class conflict takes on a violent nature and involves repression, assault, restriction of civil liberties, and murderous violence such as assassinations or death squads.

Thomas Jefferson

Although Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) led the U.S. as president from 1801–1809 and is considered one of the founding fathers, he died with immense amounts of debt. Regarding the interaction between social classes, he wrote,

I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, & restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you & I, & Congress & Assemblies, judges & governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington - January 16, 1787

Warren Buffett

The investor, billionaire, and philanthropist Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world, voiced in 2005 and once more in 2006 his view that his class – the "rich class" – is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In 2005 Buffet said to CNN: "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." In a November 2006 interview in The New York Times, Buffett stated that "[t]here’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." Later Warren gave away more than half of his fortune to charitable causes through a program developed by himself and computer software tycoon Bill Gates. In 2011 Buffett called on government legislators to, "...stop coddling the super rich."

Max Weber

Max Weber (1864–1920) agrees with the fundamental ideas of Karl Marx about the economy causing class conflict, but claims that class conflict can also stem from prestige and power. Weber argues that classes come from the different property locations. Different locations can largely affect one's class by their education and the people they associate with. He also states that prestige results in different status groupings. This prestige is based upon the social status of one's parents. Prestige is an attributed value and many times cannot be changed. Weber states that power differences led to the formation of political parties. Weber disagrees with Marx about the formation of classes. While Marx believes that groups are similar due to their economic status, Weber argues that classes are largely formed by social status. Weber does not believe that communities are formed by economic standing, but by similar social prestige. Weber does recognize that there is a relationship between social status, social prestige and classes.

Arab Spring

Numerous factors have culminated in what's known as the Arab Spring. Agenda behind the civil unrest, and the ultimate overthrow of authoritarian governments throughout the Middle-East included issues such as dictatorship or absolute monarchy, human rights violations, government corruption (demonstrated by Wikileaks diplomatic cables), economic decline, unemployment, extreme poverty, and a number of demographic structural factors, such as a large percentage of educated but dissatisfied youth within the population. Also, some, like Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek attribute the 2009 Iranian protests as one of the reasons behind the Arab Spring. The catalysts for the revolts in all Northern African and Persian Gulf countries have been the concentration of wealth in the hands of autocrats in power for decades, insufficient transparency of its redistribution, corruption, and especially the refusal of the youth to accept the status quo. as they involve threats to food security worldwide and prices that approach levels of the 2007–2008 world food price crisis. Amnesty International singled out WikiLeaks' release of U.S. diplomatic cables as a catalyst for the revolts.

Socialism

Marxist perspectives

Karl Marx, 1875

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German born philosopher who lived the majority of his adult life in London, England. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx argued that a class is formed when its members achieve class consciousness and solidarity. This largely happens when the members of a class become aware of their exploitation and the conflict with another class. A class will then realize their shared interests and a common identity. According to Marx, a class will then take action against those that are exploiting the lower classes.

What Marx points out is that members of each of the two main classes have interests in common. These class or collective interests are in conflict with those of the other class as a whole. This in turn leads to conflict between individual members of different classes.

Marxist analysis of society identifies two main social groups:

• Labour (the proletariat or workers) includes anyone who earns their livelihood by selling their labor power and being paid a wage or salary for their labor time. They have little choice but to work for capital, since they typically have no independent way to survive.
• Capital (the bourgeoisie or capitalists) includes anyone who gets their income not from labor as much as from the surplus value they appropriate from the workers who create wealth. The income of the capitalists, therefore, is based on their exploitation of the workers (proletariat).

Not all class struggle is violent or necessarily radical, as with strikes and lockouts. Class antagonism may instead be expressed as low worker morale, minor sabotage and pilferage, and individual workers' abuse of petty authority and hoarding of information. It may also be expressed on a larger scale by support for socialist or populist parties. On the employers' side, the use of union busting legal firms and the lobbying for anti-union laws are forms of class struggle.

Not all class struggle is a threat to capitalism, or even to the authority of an individual capitalist. A narrow struggle for higher wages by a small sector of the working-class, what is often called "economism", hardly threatens the status quo. In fact, by applying the craft-union tactics of excluding other workers from skilled trades, an economistic struggle may even weaken the working class as a whole by dividing it. Class struggle becomes more important in the historical process as it becomes more general, as industries are organized rather than crafts, as workers' class consciousness rises, and as they self-organize away from political parties. Marx referred to this as the progress of the proletariat from being a class "in itself", a position in the social structure, to being one "for itself", an active and conscious force that could change the world.

Marx largely focuses on the capital industrialist society as the source of social stratification, which ultimately results in class conflict. He states that capitalism creates a division between classes which can largely be seen in manufacturing factories. The proletariat, is separated from the bourgeoisie because production becomes a social enterprise. Contributing to their separation is the technology that is in factories. Technology de-skills and alienates workers as they are no longer viewed as having a specialized skill. Another effect of technology is a homogenous workforce that can be easily replaceable. Marx believed that this class conflict would result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and that the private property would be communally owned. The mode of production would remain, but communal ownership would eliminate class conflict.

Even after a revolution, the two classes would struggle, but eventually the struggle would recede and the classes dissolve. As class boundaries broke down, the state apparatus would wither away. According to Marx, the main task of any state apparatus is to uphold the power of the ruling class; but without any classes there would be no need for a state. That would lead to the classless, stateless communist society.

Soviet Union and similar societies

A variety of predominantly Trotskyist and anarchist thinkers argue that class conflict existed in Soviet-style societies. Their arguments describe as a class the bureaucratic stratum formed by the ruling political party (known as the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union), sometimes termed a "new class", that controls and guides the means of production. This ruling class is viewed to be in opposition to the remainder of society, generally considered the proletariat. This type of system is referred by them as state socialism, state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism or new class societies. (Cliff; Ðilas 1957) Marxism was such a predominate ideological power in what became the Soviet Union since a Marxist group known as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was formed in the country, prior to 1917. This party soon divided into two main factions; the Bolsheviks, who were led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Mensheviks, who were led by Julius Martov.

However, many Marxist argue that unlike in capitalism the Soviet elites did not own the means of production, or generated surplus value for their personal wealth like in capitalism as the generated profit from the economy was equally distributed into Soviet society. Even some Trotskyist like Ernest Mandel criticized the concept of a new ruling class as an oxymoron, saying: "The hypothesis of the bureaucracy’s being a new ruling class leads to the conclusion that, for the first time in history, we are confronted with a “ruling class” which does not exist as a class before it actually rules."

Non-Marxist perspectives

Social commentators, historians and socialist theorists had commented on class struggle for some time before Marx as well as the connection between class struggle, property, and law. This include Augustin Thierry, François Guizot, François-Auguste Mignet and Adolphe Thiers. The Physiocrats, David Ricardo, and after Marx, Henry George noted the inelastic supply of land and argued that this created certain privileges (economic rent) for landowners. According to the historian Arnold Toynbee, stratification along lines of class appears only within civilizations, and furthermore only appears during the process of a civilization's decline while not characterizing the growth phase of a civilization.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in What is Property? (1840) states that "certain classes do not relish investigation into the pretended titles to property, and its fabulous and perhaps scandalous history." While Proudhon saw the solution as the lower classes forming an alternative, solidarity economy centered on cooperatives and self-managed workplaces, which would slowly undermine and replace capitalist class society, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, while influenced by Proudhon, insisted that a massive class struggle by the working class, peasantry and poor was essential to the creation of libertarian socialism. This would require a (final) showdown in the form of a social revolution.

Fascists have often opposed class struggle and instead have attempted to appeal to the working class while promising to preserve the existing social classes and have proposed an alternative concept known as class collaboration.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, 2004

Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher, and political activist has criticized class war in the United States:

Well, there’s always a class war going on. The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is recognized... The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look at CEO salaries....

— Noam Chomsky, OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity, Second Edition (November 5, 2013)

Relation to race

Jobless black workers in the heat of the Philadelphia summer, 1973

Some historical tendencies of Orthodox Marxism reject racism, sexism, etc. as struggles that essentially distract from class struggle, the real conflict. These divisions within the class prevent the purported antagonists from acting in their common class interest. However, many Marxist internationalists and anti-colonial revolutionaries believe sex, race and class to be bound up together. There is an ongoing debate within Marxist scholarship about these topics.

According to Michel Foucault, in the 19th century the essentialist notion of the "race" was incorporated by racists, biologists, and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "biological race" which was then integrated to "state racism". On the other hand, Foucault claims that when Marxists developed their concept of "class struggle", they were partly inspired by the older, non-biological notions of the "race" and the "race struggle". Quoting a non-existent 1882 letter from Marx to Friedrich Engels during a lecture, Foucault erroneously claimed Marx wrote: You know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle. For Foucault, the theme of social war provides the overriding principle that connects class and race struggle.

Moses Hess, an important theoretician and labor Zionist of the early socialist movement, in his "Epilogue" to "Rome and Jerusalem" argued that "the race struggle is primary, the class struggle secondary... With the cessation of race antagonism, the class struggle will also come to a standstill. The equalization of all classes of society will necessarily follow the emancipation of all the races, for it will ultimately become a scientific question of social economics."

W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain certain aspects of black political economy. Patricia Hill Collins writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African-American access to status, poverty, and power."

In modern times, emerging schools of thought in the U.S. and other countries hold the opposite to be true. They argue that the race struggle is less important, because the primary struggle is that of class since labor of all races face the same problems and injustices.

Proletariat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat 

The proletariat (/ˌproʊlɪˈtɛəriət/ from Latin proletarius "producing offspring") is the class of wage-earners in an economic society whose only possession of significant material value is their labour-power (how much work they can do). A member of such a class is a proletarian.

Marxist theory considers the proletariat to be oppressed by capitalism and the wage system. This oppression gives the proletariat common economic and political interests that transcend national boundaries. These common interests put the proletariat in a position to unite and take power away from the capitalist class, in order to create a communist society free from class distinctions.

Proletarii in Ancient Rome

The proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens owning little or no property. The origin of the name is presumably linked with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their property from which their military duties and voting privileges could be determined. For citizens with property valued 11,000 assēs or less, which was below the lowest census for military service, their children—proles (from Latin prōlēs, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring". The only contribution of a proletarius to the Roman society was seen in his ability to raise children, the future Roman citizens who can colonize new territories conquered by the Roman Republic and later by the Roman Empire. The citizens who had no property of significance were called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property...but simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family."

Although included in one of the five support centuriae of the Comitia Centuriata (English: Centuriate Assembly), proletarii were largely deprived of their voting rights due to their low social status caused by their lack of "even the minimum property required for the lowest class" and a class-based hierarchy of the Comitia Centuriata. The late Roman historians, such as Livy, not without some uncertainty, understood the Comitia Centuriata to be one of three forms of popular assembly of early Rome composed of centuriae, the voting units whose members represented a class of citizens according to the value of their property. This assembly, which usually met on the Campus Martius to discuss public policy issues, was also used as a means of designating military duties demanded of Roman citizens. One of reconstructions of the Comitia Centuriata features 18 centuriae of cavalry, and 170 centuriae of infantry divided into five classes by wealth, plus 5 centuriae of support personnel called adsidui. The top infantry class assembled with full arms and armor; the next two classes brought arms and armor, but less and lesser; the fourth class only spears; the fifth slings. In voting, the cavalry and top infantry class were enough to decide an issue; as voting started at the top, an issue might be decided before the lower classes voted.

After the closing of the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), a series of subsequent wars, including the Jugurthine War and various conflicts in Macedonia and Asia, resulted in a significant reduction in the number of Roman family farmers. The effect was therefore that the Roman Republic experienced a shortage of people whose property qualified them to perform the citizenry's military duty to Rome. As a result of the Marian reforms initiated in 107 BC by the Roman general Gaius Marius (157–86), which expanded the eligibility of military service to the urban poor, the proletarii became the backbone of the Roman army.

Modern era reintroduction of Proletariat and Proletarian terms

In the era of early 19th century, many Western European liberal scholars — who dealt with social sciences and economics — pointed out the socio-economic similarities of the modern rapidly growing industrial worker class and the classic ancient proletarians. One of the earliest analogies can be found in the 1807 paper of French philosopher and political scientist Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais. Later it was translated to English with the title: "Modern Slavery".

Swiss liberal economist and historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, was the first who applied the proletariat term to the working class created under capitalism, and whose writings were frequently cited by Marx. Marx most likely encountered the Proletariat term while studying the works of Sismondi.

Marxist theory

Karl Marx, who studied Roman law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, used the term proletariat in his socio-political theory of Marxism to describe a working class unadulterated by private property and capable of a revolutionary action to topple capitalism in order to create classless society. In Marxist theory, the proletariat is the social class that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor power for a wage or salary. Proletarians are wage-workers, while some refer to those who receive salaries as the salariat. For Marx, however, wage labor may involve getting a salary rather than a wage per se. Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie (capitalist class) as occupying conflicting positions, since workers automatically wish their wages to be as high as possible, while owners and their proxies wish for wages (costs) to be as low as possible.

A 1911 Industrial Worker publication advocating industrial unionism based on a critique of capitalism. The proletariat "work for all" and "feed all".

 

In Marxist theory, the borders between the proletariat and some layers of the petite bourgeoisie, who rely primarily but not exclusively on self-employment at an income no different from an ordinary wage or below it — and the lumpenproletariat, who are not in legal employment — are not necessarily well defined. Intermediate positions are possible, where some wage-labor for an employer combines with self-employment. Marx makes a clear distinction between proletariat as salaried workers, which he sees as a progressive class, and Lumpenproletariat, "rag-proletariat", the poorest and outcasts of the society, such as beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes, which he considers a retrograde class. Socialist parties have often struggled over the question of whether they should seek to organize and represent all the lower classes, or just the wage-earning proletariat.

According to Marxism, capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. This exploitation takes place as follows: the workers, who own no means of production of their own, must use the means of production that are property of others in order to produce, and consequently earn, their living. Instead of hiring those means of production, they themselves get hired by capitalists and work for them, producing goods or services. These goods or services become the property of the capitalist, who sells them at the market.

One part of the wealth produced is used to pay the workers' wages (variable costs), another part to renew the means of production (constant costs) while the third part, surplus value is split between the capitalist's private takings (profit), and the money used to pay rents, taxes, interests, etc. Surplus value is the difference between the wealth that the proletariat produces through its work, and the wealth it consumes to survive and to provide labor to the capitalist companies. A part of the surplus value is used to renew or increase the means of production, either in quantity or quality (i.e., it is turned into capital), and is called capitalized surplus value. What remains is consumed by the capitalist class.

The commodities that proletarians produce and capitalists sell are valued for the amount of labor embodied in them. The same goes for the workers' labor power itself: it is valued, not for the amount of wealth it produces, but for the amount of labor necessary to produce and reproduce it. Thus the capitalists earn wealth from the labor of their employees, not as a function of their personal contribution to the productive process, which may even be null, but as a function of the juridical relation of property to the means of production. Marxists argue that new wealth is created through labor applied to natural resources.

Marx argued that the proletariat would displace the capitalist system with the dictatorship of the proletariat, abolishing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a communist society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all".

Prole drift

Prole drift, short for proletarian drift, is the tendency in advanced industrialized societies for everything inexorably to become proletarianized, or to become commonplace and commodified. This trend is attributed to mass production, mass selling, mass communication and mass education. Examples include best-seller lists, films and music that must appeal to the masses, and shopping malls.

Mental health in China

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health_in_China 

 

Mental health in China is a growing issue. Experts have estimated that about 173 million people living in China are suffering from a mental disorder. The desire to seek treatment is largely hindered by China's strict social norms (and subsequent stigmas), as well as religious and cultural beliefs regarding personal reputation and social harmony. While the Chinese government is committed to expanding mental health care services and legislation, the country struggles with a lack of mental health professionals and access to specialists in rural areas.

History

China's first mental institutions were introduced before 1849 by Western missionaries. Missionary and doctor John G. Kerr opened the first psychiatric hospital in 1898, with the goal of providing care to people with mental health issues, and treating them in a more humane way.

In 1949, the country began developing its mental health resources by building psychiatric hospitals and facilities for training mental health professionals. However, many community programs were discontinued during the Cultural Revolution.

In a meeting jointly held by Chinese ministries and the World Health Organization in 1999, the Chinese government committed to creating a mental health action plan and a national mental health law, among other measures to expand and improve care. The action plan, adopted in 2002, outlined China's priorities of enacting legislation, educating its people on mental illness and mental health resources, and developing a stable and comprehensive system of care.

In 2000, the Minority Health Disparities Research and Education Act was enacted. This act helped in raising national awareness on health issues through research, health education, and data collection.

Since 2006, the government's 686 Program has worked to redevelop community mental health programs and make these the primary resource, instead of psychiatric hospitals, for people with mental illnesses. These community programs make it possible for mental health care to reach rural areas, and for people in these areas to become mental health professionals. However, despite the improvement in access to professional treatment, mental health specialists are still relatively inaccessible to rural populations. The program also emphasizes rehabilitation, rather than the management of symptoms.

In 2011, the legal institution of China's State Council published a draft for a new mental health law, which includes new regulations concerning the rights of patients to not to be hospitalized against their will. The draft law also promotes the transparency of patient treatment management, as many hospitals were driven by financial motives and disregarded patients' rights. The law, adopted in 2012, stipulates that a qualified psychiatrist must make the determination of mental illness; that patients can choose whether to receive treatment in most cases; and that only those at risk of harming themselves or others are eligible for compulsory inpatient treatment. However, Human Rights Watch has criticized the law. For example, although it creates some rights for detained patients to request a second opinion from another state psychiatrists and then an independent psychiatrist, there is no right to a legal hearing such as a mental health tribunal and no guarantee of legal representation.

Since 1993, WHO has been collaborating with China in the development of a national mental health information system.

Current

Though China continues to develop its mental health services, it continues to have a large number of untreated and undiagnosed people with mental illnesses. The aforementioned intense stigma associated with mental illness, a lack of mental health professionals and specialists, and culturally-specific expressions of mental illness may play a role in the disparity.

Prevalence of mental disorders

Researchers estimate that roughly 173 million people in China have a mental disorder. Over 90 percent of people with a mental disorder have never been treated.

A lack of government data on mental disorders makes it difficult to estimate the prevalence of specific mental disorders, as China has not conducted a national psychiatric survey since 1993.

The map of disability-adjusted life years shows the disproportionate impact on the quality of life for persons with bipolar disorder in China and other East Asian countries.

 

Conducted between 2001 and 2005, a non-governmental survey of 63,000 Chinese adults found that 16 percent of the population had a mood disorder, including 6 percent of people with major depressive disorder. Thirteen percent of the population had an anxiety disorder and 9 percent had an alcohol use disorder. Women were more likely to have a mood or anxiety disorder compared to men, but men were significantly more likely to have an alcohol use disorder. People living in rural areas were more likely to have major depressive disorder or alcohol dependence.

In 2007, the Chief of China's National Centre for Mental Health, Liu Jin, estimated that approximately 50 percent of outpatient admissions were due to depression.

There is a disproportionate impact on the quality of life for people with bipolar disorder in China and other East Asian countries.

The suicide rate in China was approximately 23 per 100,000 people between 1995 and 1999. Since then, the rate is thought to have fallen to roughly 7 per 100,000 people, according to government data. WHO states that the rate of suicide is thought to be three to four times higher in rural areas than in urban areas. The most common method, poisoning by pesticides, accounts for 62 percent of incidences.

Stigma related to cultural and folk beliefs

It is estimated that 18 percent of the Chinese population of over 244 million people believe in Buddhism. Another 22 percent of the population, roughly 294 million people believe in folk religions which are a group of beliefs that share characteristics with Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and shamanism. Common between all of these philosophical and religious beliefs is an emphasis on acting harmoniously with nature, with strong morals, and with a duty to family. Followers of these religions perceive behavior as being tightly connected with health; illnesses are often thought to be a result of moral failure or insufficiently honoring one's family in current or past life. Furthermore, an emphasis on social harmony may discourage people with mental illness from bringing attention to themselves and seeking help. They may also refuse to speak about their mental illness because of the shame it would bring upon themselves and their family members, who could also be held responsible and experience social isolation.

Also, reputation might be a factor that prevents individuals from seeking professional help. Good reputations are highly valued. In a Chinese household, every individual shares the responsibility of maintaining and raising the family's reputation. It is believed that mental health will hinder individuals from achieving the standards and goals- whether academic, social, career-based, or other- expected from parents. Without reaching the expectations, individuals are anticipated to bring shame to the family, which will affect the family's overall reputation. Therefore, mental health issues are seen as an unacceptable weakness. This perception of mental health disorders causes individuals to internalize their mental health problems, possibly worsening them, and making it difficult to seek treatment. Eventually, it becomes ignored and overlooked by families.

In addition, many of these philosophies teach followers to accept one's fate. Consequently, people with mental disorders may be less inclined to seek medical treatment because they believe they should not actively try to prevent any symptoms that may manifest. They may also be less likely to question the stereotypes associated with people with mental illness, and instead agreeing with others that they deserve to be ostracized.

Lack of qualified staff

China has 17,000 certified psychiatrists, which is 10 percent of that of other developed countries per capita. China averages one psychologist for every 83,000 people, and some of these psychologists are not board-licensed or certified to diagnose illnesses. Individuals without any academic background in mental health can obtain a license to counsel, following several months of training through the National Exam for Psychological Counselors. Many psychiatrists or psychologists study psychology for personal use and do not intend to pursue a career in counseling. Patients are likely to leave clinics with false diagnoses, and often do not return for follow-up treatments, which is detrimental to the degenerative nature of many psychiatric disorders.

The disparity between psychiatric services available between rural and urban areas partially contributes to this statistic, as rural areas have traditionally relied on barefoot doctors since the 1970s for medical advice. These doctors are one of the few modes of healthcare able to reach isolated parts of rural China, and are unable to obtain modern medical equipment, and therefore, unable to reliably diagnose psychiatric illnesses. Furthermore, the nearest psychiatric clinic may be hundreds of miles away, and families may be unable to afford professional psychiatric treatment for the afflicted.

Physical symptoms

Multiple studies have found that Chinese patients with mental illness report more physical symptoms compared to Western patients, who tend to report more psychological symptoms. For example, Chinese patients with depression are more likely to report feelings of fatigue and muscle aches instead of feelings of depression. However, it is unclear whether this occurs because they feel more comfortable reporting physical symptoms or if depression manifests in a more physical way among Chinese people.

Chinese Military Mental Health

Overview

Military mental health has recently become an area of focus and improvement, particularly in Western countries. For example, in the United States, it is estimated that about twenty-five percent of active military members suffer from a mental health problem, such as PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury, and depression. Currently, there are no clear initiatives from the government about mental health treatment towards military personnel in China. Specifically, China has been investing in resources towards researching and understanding how the mental health needs of military members and producing policies to reinforce the research results.

Background

Research on the mental health status of active Chinese military men began in the 1980s where psychologists investigated soldiers' experiences in the plateaus. The change of emphasis from physical to mental health can be seen in China's four dominant military academic journals: First Military Journal, Second Military Journal, Third Military Journal, and Fourth Military Journal. In the 1980s, researchers mostly focused on the physical health of soldiers; as the troops' ability to perform their services declined, the government began looking at their mental health to provide an explanation for this trend. In the 1990s, research on it increased with the hope that by improving the mental health of soldiers, combat effectiveness improves.

Mental health issue can impact active military members' effectiveness in the army, and can create lasting effects on them after they leave the military. Plateaus were an area of interest in this sense because of harsh environmental conditions and the necessity of the work done with low atmospheric pressure and intense UV radiation. It was critical to place the military there to stabilize the outskirts and protect the Chinese citizens who live nearby; this made it one of the most important jobs in the army, then increasing the pressure on those who worked in the plateaus. It not only affected the body physically, like in the arteries, lungs, and back, but caused high levels of depression in soldiers because of being away from family members and with limited communication methods. Scientists found that this may impact their lives as they saw that this population had higher rates of divorce and unemployment.

Comparatively, assessing the mental health status of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is difficult, because military members work a diverse array of duties over a large landscape. Military members also play an active part in disaster relief, peacekeeping in foreign lands, protecting borders, and domestic riot control. In a study of 11,000 soldiers, researchers found that those who work as peacekeepers have higher levels of depression compared to those in the engineering and medical departments. With such diverse military roles over an area of 3.25 million miles, it is difficult to gauge its impacts on soldiers’ psyche and provide a single method to address mental health problems.

Researches have increased over the last two decades, but the studies still lack a sense of comprehensiveness and reliability. In over 73 studies that together included 53,424 military members, some research shows that there is gradual improvement in mental health at high altitudes, such as mountain tops; other researchers found that depressive symptoms can worsen. These research studies demonstrate how difficult it is to assess and treat the mental illness that occurs in the army and how there are inconsistent results. Studies of the military population focus on the men of the military and exclude women, even though the number of women that are joining the military has increased in the last two decades.

Chinese researchers try to provide solutions that are preventative and reactive, such as implementing early mental health training, or mental health assessments to help service members understand their mental health state, and how to combat these feelings themselves. Researchers also suggest to improve the mental health of the military members, programs should include psychoeducation, psychological training, and attention to physical health to employ timely intervention.

Implementation

In 2006, the People's Republic Minister for National Defense began mental health vetting at the beginning of the military recruitment process. A Chinese military study consisting of 2500 male military personnel found that some members are more predisposed to mental illness. The study measured levels of anxious behaviors, symptoms of depression, sensitivity to traumatic events, resilience and emotional intelligence of existing personnel to aid the screening of new recruits. Similar research has been conducted into the external factors that impact a person's mental fortitude, including single-child status, urban or rural environment, and education level. Subsequently, the government has incorporated mental illness coping techniques into their training manual. In 2013 leak by the Tibetan Center for Human Rights of a small portion of the People's Liberation Army training manual from 2008, specifically concerned how military personnel could combat PTSD and depression while on peacekeeping missions in Tibet. The manual suggested that soldiers should:

“...close [their] eyes and imagine zooming in on the scene like a camera [when experiencing PTSD]. It may feel uncomfortable. Then zoom all the way out until you cannot see anything. Then tell yourself the flashback is gone.”

In 2012, the government specifically addressed military mental health in a legal document for the first time. In article 84 of the Mental Health Law of the People's Republic of China, it stated, “The State Council and the Central Military Committee will formulate regulations based on this law to manage mental health work in the military."

Besides screening, assessments and an excerpt of the manual, not much is known about the services that are provided to active military members and veterans. Analysis of more than 45 different studies, moreover, has deemed that the level of anxiety in current and ex-military personnel has increased despite efforts of the People's Republic due to economic conditions, lack of social connects and the feeling of a threat to military livelihood. This growing anxiety manifested in both 2016 and 2018, as Chinese veterans demonstrated their satisfaction with the system via protests across China. In both instances, veterans advocated for an increased focus on post-service benefits, resources to aid in post-service jobs, and justice for those who were treated poorly by the government. As a way to combat the dissatisfaction of veterans and alleviate growing tension, the government established the Ministry of Veteran Affairs in 2018. At the same time, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, promised to enact laws that protect the welfare of veterans.