Ten officials from Guangzhou have been disciplined after thousands of banyan trees, a mainstay of the southern Chinese city’s landscape, were cut down. The decision, announced over the weekend, was likely to have been approved by President Xi Jinping, who made an unusual intervention to signal his displeasure, experts said.

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       Li Xi, the Communist Party chief in Guangdong, the province in which Guangzhou is located, told state media Sunday that the tree removal “gravely damaged the city’s natural ecological environment” and “hurt the public’s fond memories and feelings.” Li added that local officials should realize that Xi paid significant attention to Guangzhou and recognize the severity of the problem.

       Among the officials who were punished included Lin Daoping, a city vice mayor, who was given a warning and sacked, according to China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Four other officials were also fired. Since late 2020, Guangzhou has removed many banyan trees as part of municipal beautification projects.

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       The scale of the punishment was “unprecedented,” said Alfred Wu, a Chinese public policy expert at the National University of Singapore. Leaders in Guangzhou, one of China’s largest and most affluent cities, wield political power on par with those of provincial officials, indicating the move was “most likely” approved by Xi, he added.

       In recent years, China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, has tried to position itself as a global environmental leader. One of Beijing’s set-piece efforts is reforestation, which includes an ambitious plan to plant more new forests annually than Belgium has land, according to Reuters.

       But Guangzhou’s forestry bureau says nearly half the trees in the city are of the banyan species, exceeding the 20 percent cap set by Beijing. Their overgrown roots could also damage roads and underground pipes, authorities claimed.

       There has, however, been a groundswell of local support for keeping the trees. Students were recently assigned essays on the role banyan trees play in urban planning, according to local media, while an informal poll indicated that many residents wanted to keep the trees.

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       Protecting banyan trees in Guangzhou isn’t likely to improve Chinese ecology dramatically, but the harsh and widely publicized punishment will deter other local officials, said Victor Shih, a Chinese politics expert at the University of California, San Diego. “Local officials [will be deterred] from doing something so visceral to change the landscape … People are going to complain, and some of these complaints will reach the desk of Xi Jinping.”

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       But Guangzhou may hold special significance for Xi, Shih noted, adding that Xi Zhongxun, the president’s late father, served as a top official in Guangdong province in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

       The announcement of the 10 officials being punished appeared to be broadly welcomed by city residents. “How can the city be called Guangzhou without the banyan trees,” one user wrote on the Weibo microblogging service. “[With these trees] chopped, [the government] better plant banyans back.”

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