Xinhua
Published: 2025-03-01 17:11:34
Updated:
2025-03-01 22:38:28
FUZHOU, March 1 (Xinhua) — A century-old camphor tree, once on the brink of death, has been revived as a group of deputies to the municipal legislative body in Fuzhou, east China’s Fujian Province, went to great lengths to come to its rescue.
Throughout 2023, the fate of the tree was the most pressing concern of Zheng Shuhong, a deputy to the municipal people’s congress of Fuzhou, the city’s legislature.
The camphor tree, once a source of shade for generations of locals in Xujia Village of Fuzhou’s Minhou County, was reduced to a bare trunk when workers, displaying a complete lack of awareness for its safety, attempted to relocate the tree to make way for a construction project in January 2023. This careless act left it stripped of all its leaves and branches.
Locals were horrified, but they knew where to seek help: the whole-process people’s democracy practice center in the county, an outreach arm of local legislature.
There, they found Zheng and poured out their concerns to the lawmaker on duty who happens to be in charge of the liaison for issues on environmental protection.
To remedy the situation, Zheng contacted the center’s two other deputies at once. Together, they made a field trip to the village, informed local procuratorial organ of the damages to the tree, and managed to halt the construction project’s groundwork.
The deputies initiated a followup investigation and soon uncovered that, although it was more than 100 years old, the camphor tree was not protected by laws or regulations. In fact, measures to protect and manage trees in Fuzhou only applied to urban areas at the time.
“There are over 9,000 trees that meet the standards of ancient or notable trees in the city’s suburbs. Many of the trees scattered deep in mountains and forests lack effective management and protection,” Zheng said.
The deputies, taken aback by such a significant oversight, embarked on a fact-finding mission that took them to Fuzhou’s other counties such as Yongtai and Fuqing to see the real situation of ancient or notable trees firsthand.
They also organized meetings and discussions, and invited representatives of local forestry and landscape bureaus, as well as tree protection workers in all five districts and eight counties of Fuzhou, to understand the difficulties in the protection of these trees.
Four months later, they had dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s in their report — which included suggestions for new regulations on the protection and management of such trees — and submitted it to the municipal people’s congress.
At the end of 2023, the newly revised measures for the protection and management of ancient or notable trees in Fuzhou were approved by the Standing Committee of the Fujian Provincial People’s Congress. These measures apply to all administrative areas of Fuzhou, expanding the protection scope from over 1,000 to around 10,000 ancient or notable trees.
Deputies like Zheng are a backbone force in practicing China’s democracy, which observers say is different from the democracy in the West where politicians and election campaigners would only hear what the people say when casting ballots.
The whole-process people’s democracy practiced in China aims to put the people at the center so that the public enjoy not just the right to election, but also the right to be broadly involved in the whole process of decision-making and governance.
To reach out to the people and address their needs in a timely manner, legislatures at various levels have been taking a proactive approach. One relevant institutional arrangement is the launch of whole-process people’s democracy practice centers known as legislative liaison stations where grassroots deputies discuss legislative drafts and collect suggestions from the public.
By March 2023, people’s congresses at all levels have set up over 220,000 stations for deputies to engage with the public, covering all townships and subdistricts, as well as some communities and villages.
In Fuzhou, for instance, eight liaison stations have been launched, and each of them focuses on a specific sector, which allows deputies, with similar career backgrounds but elected in different electoral districts and at the provincial, city, county and township levels, to strengthen exchanges. In this way, they can more easily find issues of common concern, carry out deeper investigations and devise better suggestions.
Similar efforts to further advance democracy and environmental protection are not limited to Fujian. In central China’s Hunan Province, more than 230,000 ancient trees have been granted legal protection, thanks to the diligent work of political advisor Lai Mingyong.
During a trip to the mountainous county of Youxian in Hunan, Lai, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), discovered a 1,500-year-old tree riddled with iron nails used as hangers. Moved by the need to protect such trees, he submitted a prompt proposal through the CPPCC Hunan Provincial Committee’s online platform.
As a political consultative body, the CPPCC gathers members of various political parties, prominent individuals without party affiliation and people from all ethnic groups and different sectors to provide advice and recommendations to state institutions, including conducting in-depth studies on certain sectors to check if relevant policies are properly implemented, collecting feedback from the public and making proposals.
Local authorities’ reaction to Lai’s proposal was swift. Trial schemes were soon implemented, followed by formal regulations for the protection of ancient and notable trees. Damaging one of these trees can now result in fines of up to 5,000 yuan (about 697 U.S. dollars).
“Chinese democracy has never been an ornament,” Lai said.
In January, China introduced its first national-level regulations to protect ancient and notable trees, aligning with the country’s broader goals of building an ecological civilization and preserving cultural identity.
These regulations, set to take effect on March 15, define ancient trees as those over 100 years old, and notable trees as those with historical, cultural or ecological importance. A national survey conducted from 2015 to 2021 identified 5.08 million ancient or notable trees across China.
For Zhang Zhaohui, an official with the National Forestry and Grassland Administration’s ecological protection and restoration department, these tree-rescuing efforts offered a glimpse into how governments responded to public concerns under the supervision of lawmakers and in collaboration with political advisors.
“By practicing democracy in this way, we pulled together and had the heritage trees better protected,” he said.