Tall as a 15-story building, with a mighty trunk, crooked branches and a kingly canopy of leaves, the London plane tree, Platanus x acerifolia, is prized by horticulturists and city planners as a “supertree,” immune to urban grime and smog.
However, can it survive a -development-hungry Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? In Nanjing, a southeastern city of 8 million people, the answer seems — for now — to be yes.
In a nation where homes and farmland are routinely chewed up for the sake of high rises and factories, a grassroots campaign by Nanjing residents this spring to save hundreds of the trees, known in China as the wutong, from a subway expansion might seem like a nonstarter. However, the effort, organized mostly online, has led to a surprising compromise from local government officials.
It was not a shining example of democracy in action. However, neither were ordinary citizens left fuming about power-drunk bureaucrats deaf to anyone below.
Maybe that is because some Nanjing officials consider the CCP’s credo of “supervision by the people” to be more than mere words. Or maybe it is because trees, in the scheme of development, provide an easy compromise.
Giants in the arboreal world, the wutong were introduced in China by the French in the late 1800s or early 1900s to adorn their settlement in Shanghai, Nanjing officials say. In 1928 and 1929, Nanjing planted more than 20,000 saplings along Zhongshan Avenue, a road leading to the mausoleum of the anti-imperialist leader Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), revered as the founding father of modern China.
Many more were reportedly planted after the Communists took power in 1949. The trees grew fast and provided shade during Nanjing’s scorching summers. And they became not just a symbol of Nanjing’s graceful beauty, but of its civic philosophy. Its urban plan touts the city’s integration with mountains, rivers and trees.
“The people of Nanjing grew up together with these trees,” said He Jinxue, the daily operations director for the city’s urban construction commission. “There is so much emotional attachment to them.”
That did not shield them from the onslaught of development. In 1993, more than 3,000 were felled virtually overnight to make way for the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway. Nearly 200 more were removed to build Nanjing Subway Line Two in 2006.
Then, this year, came Subway Line Three, calling for more than 1,000 trees — mostly wutong — to be beheaded, uprooted and plunked down elsewhere to make space for six above-ground stations in the city center.
Nanjing’s two existing subway lines, each carrying 1 million commuters a day, are not nearly enough, He said, adding that more than 10 new lines are planned, he said.
However, once workers had reduced a first batch of 49 wutong to trunks and a few feet of branches, the Chinese equivalents of Twitter rustled with more than 10,000 outraged messages. A schoolteacher organized students to tie green ribbons around some untouched trees.
Several celebrities weighed in, including Huang Jianxiang (黃健翔), a freelance television host and sports commentator whose Sina Weibo microblog is followed by more than 5 million people. So did a Taiwanese lawmaker, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅), because the KMT used Nanjing its headquarters until it was vanquished by the Communists in 1949.