Hong Kong’s Response to Deadly Fire Shows China’s Play Book in Action

In a sign of China’s role in the city, officials have tried to stamp out calls for accountability over a catastrophe that killed at least 159 people.

Residents of Hong Kong had a perfectly natural response after a devastating fire in an apartment complex killed at least 159 people last week: They mourned the tragedy, which left thousands homeless, and tried to make sense of what had happened. They demanded an independent investigation and official accountability.

What they got from their leaders were smears and intimidation.

In Hong Kong, a city that prided itself on civic engagement and the rule of law, public grief and anger have become politically dangerous. The authorities are now determined to ensure that the fire does not result in anything resembling collective action.

The police detained and then released a university student who handed out fliers calling for an independent inquiry, according to local news reports. And a news conference planned by lawyers, social workers and policy experts was canceled after an organizer was summoned by the police.

A national security official toured the charred Wang Fuk Court apartment complex, where, as a government-affiliated newspaper claimed, in a clear reference to 2019 anti-government protests in Hong Kong, “black-clad rioters” and pro-democracy supporters attempted to “hijack” relief efforts for anti-government purposes. Separately, Beijing’s national security branch in the city warned against “using the disaster to cause chaos in Hong Kong.”

It was an extraordinary message to send the public when the city was still in shock, when dozens of bodies were yet to be identified. Yet the logic behind it is familiar.

Beijing imposed a national security system on Hong Kong after the protests in 2019. It has effectively criminalized anything that officials consider counter to the interests of China or Hong Kong. As shown in the past week, the authorities in Hong Kong have internalized a crisis-management playbook that the Chinese Communist Party has relied on since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.

That playbook is built on the assumption that gatherings triggered by a tragedy might mutate into collective action. Not coincidentally, the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen began with public mourning.

For more than three decades, the party has treated spontaneous civic activity after disasters as a potential political threat. It has poured tremendous resources into constructing a vast stability-maintenance apparatus designed around a consistent sequence: Tightly control the narrative, strike early at anyone who speaks out and choose overreaction over caution. For Beijing, disaster is never merely disaster. It’s a potential crisis, a spark that must be extinguished before it becomes a firestorm.

After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed thousands of schoolchildren, parents and activists who questioned why school buildings had collapsed while government offices remained intact were detained, surveilled or silenced. Independent investigations by lawyers, volunteers and intellectuals such as the artist Ai Weiwei were suppressed.

The message was clear: Private grief was allowed; organized grief was not.

Chinese officials have flashed that reflex time and again: a high-speed rail crash in 2022, the sinking of a cruise ship in 2015, a port explosion in Tianjin that killed 173 people. In 2022, the government censored outpourings of grief online after the crash of a bus full of people being transferred to a Covid-19 quarantine facility, and again after a deadly fire in an apartment during a lockdown. In each case, attempts by families, citizens or journalists to seek truth, mourn publicly or demand accountability were treated as political dangers. Journalists were threatened, relatives were pressured to stay silent and activists were jailed.

“The lesson the party drew from Tiananmen is: You cannot wait for events to escalate,” said Minxin Pei, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. “Problems must be crushed at the earliest stage.”

Disasters, he explained, pose a unique threat to authoritarian governments because they solve the two classic obstacles to collective action: motivation and coordination. People are already angry, and they know where to gather. That is why the party focuses so intensely on the first 48 to 72 hours after a tragedy, when emotions are raw and solidarity is easiest to form. The goal is not simply to respond to the crisis but to pre-empt the possibility of collective expression.

The Hong Kong government’s response to the fire has followed this script with precision. The detention of the university student, the official “warning” visit to the site and the ominous national security statement happened shortly after the fire was put out. The student’s detention can be interpreted as striking at anyone who stands out.

The fire was the first major disaster in Hong Kong since the National Security Law was introduced in 2020. The tragedy acted as a stress test. How much civic life remained? How would the public respond? How aggressively would the government clamp down?

The fire exposed two Hong Kongs that are uneasily coexisting: an official Hong Kong that has fully absorbed Beijing’s discipline, and a determined but quieter Hong Kong that still thinks and acts like a civic community.

Five years under the National Security Law have transformed the territory in ways that the tragedy made impossible to ignore. Some residents believe the catastrophe might have been prevented under the more open and independent system that existed before. Today, even those who speak strictly in their professional capacity do so under the shadow of political risk. People measure their words, anxious about crossing an invisible red line.

The Hong Kong public demonstrated that despite years of sweeping arrests, the dismantling of civil groups and the transformation of the city’s political institutions, the city’s civic instinct has not been stamped out. People recognize one another as members of a community, capable of empathy, self-organization and insistence on basic accountability.

Thousands of people queued for hours to lay flowers at the complex. Volunteers delivered supplies, raised funds and assembled resources for the displaced. Journalists and citizens documented not only human stories but also the government’s response. Experts offered assessments of possible causes, gaps in oversight and policy failures.

None of this resembled the “anti-China, anti-Hong Kong” conspiracy that the authorities claimed was lurking in the shadows. It looked instead like a community doing what communities everywhere do in moments of crisis: grieve, help out and insist that the dead be honored and the living protected.

The Chinese and Hong Kong governments are “terrified of anything that can generate a sense of collective identity or bring people together around the idea that this is our city, our loss, our grief,” said Chung Ching Kwong, a Hong Kong activist and senior analyst at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international alliance of parliamentarians.

“This shows Hong Kong people have not been tamed,” she said. “We still care about Hong Kong. We still care about politics. We know there are things we cannot say or do because of safety, but when there is space and when there is a need, we will still stand up and make our own decisions, even at personal risks.”

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