This article was commissioned by the US online journal, Sublation Magazine, which subsequently rejected it, presumably for its positive statements about the Government of Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. The photograph of the aftermath of the Wang Fuk Court fire was taken by an anonymous photographer on 29 November, 2025, and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.
Around 2pm on Wednesday, 26 November, 2025, a fire started in the protective netting and scaffolding that had been erected around the Wang Fuk Court apartment complex in Tai Po, a district in the New Territories of Hong Kong. By the time it was put out some 43 hours later, the fire had taken the lives of 168 people, including 10 domestic workers from South-east Asia, 5 construction workers and 1 firefighter, with a further 79 people injured. This disaster has been greeted in the West with the usual glee and exaggerations with which any crisis or catastrophe in China is greeted. Accusations of corruption against Beijing and the Government of Hong Kong have been as plentiful as they have been lacking in substance, drawing, instead, on the stereotypes about the Chinese people and the Communist Party of China that are relentlessly propagated at every opportunity by Western governments and their media.
In this article, I’m not going to talk about the causes of the fire, which in some respects are clear and in others still awaiting investigation, but about the response of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) to the fire, to the deaths, and to speculation about their cause. As someone who has only lived in Hong Kong for two years I have limited qualifications to describe this response, as my reading is limited to English-language publications and my understanding of Hong Kong’s housing industry is equally limited; but as the Head of Research for Architects for Social Housing (ASH), the community interest company I co-founded in 2015 in response the UK’s housing crisis, I have certain insights into what happened in Tai Po.
Following the Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington, London, that started on 14 July, 2017, and killed 72 people, ASH published a report titled ‘The Truth about Grenfell Tower’. This was submitted by the Grenfell Action Group as part of the consultation on the terms of reference for the Grenfell Tower Inquiry into the fire that was held over more than seven years between September 2017 and February 2025. ASH’s report was also used by lawyers representing families of the dead. We were also interviewed for several documentaries about the fire, including, What Went Wrong? Countdown to Disaster — Grenfell Tower Fire, which was screened on the UK’s Channel 5, as well as in Germany and Italy. What I want to look at in this article is the different ways in which the UK Government, media and political parties responded to the Grenfell Tower fire compared to how the Hong Kong Government, media and political classes has responded to the Wang Fuck Court fire; because doing so will, I believe, reveal something about the comparative merits of the political and bureaucratic systems under which these very similar fires occurred.
1. Arrests
Perhaps the first thing to observe is that, eight-and-a-half years after the fire in London, not a single person responsible in various ways and degrees for its causes has been arrested. In contrast, as of 14 January, 2026, the police have arrested 22 people in relation to the fire in Hong Kong, 16 of them on charges of suspicion of manslaughter, which carries prison sentences, not of corporate manslaughter, the charge suggested in 2017 by the UK’s current Foreign Minister, David Lammy, which only carries a fine. This is a crucial distinction in ensuring — or at least trying to ensure — that such a fire will never happen again.
The sharpest degree of oversight in the world, required by the strictest legislation and enforced by the closest and most regular inspections, cannot stop consultants, contractors and other built-environment professionals from cutting corners to increase their profits. They can, however, increase the cost and completion time of any construction project, effectively negating much or all of whatever benefit that project might bring, whether that’s in building homes that residents can afford, refurbishing housing that has fallen into disrepair or, as in the UK, removing flammable cladding from existing buildings. As architects, the consultants on both projects — the Grenfell Tower and Wang Fuk Court refurbishments — are bound by a professional code of conduct overseen by the relevant public bodies. And while the reputation of Studio E, the architectural practice tasked with overseeing the fatal cladding of Grenfell Tower, has been damaged, hopefully irrevocably, that’s unlikely to deter other practices taking the same laisser-faire attitude to their own projects.
Indeed, in the absence of arrests for manslaughter in the UK, I imagine the probability of such a disaster event repeating itself has merely been factored into the risk assessments of the councils, tenant management organisations, housing associations, architectural practices, contractors, developers, financers, insurers and other organisations that bear the financial brunt of such abnegation of their professional duties. I can well envisage the consultant who lobbied for the contractors and oversaw their proposed cuts to, for example, the quality of materials, asking the contractors to cover whatever financial penalties are imposed on them and, even, compensation for the loss of revenue consequent upon the damage to their professional reputation from being responsible for the deaths of 72 residents. No-one, however, can be compensated for being imprisoned for their part, however small, in such deaths. The purpose of criminal sentences is not merely to punish serious crimes but also to disincentivise others from committing them; and where regulation fails the threat of imprisonment, one hopes, will not. I, for one, applaud the speed with which the Hong Kong authorities have moved to arrest, on criminal charges and not merely professional negligence, those responsible for the failures, and perhaps the corruptions, that led to the Wang Fuk Court fire.
2. Immediate Causes
The speed of these arrests has only been possible because, equally, the authorities have with equal rapidity identified the immediate cause of the fire in Wang Fuk Court. Whatever failure of regulation, implementation or financial corruption led to eight 31-storey residential towers of 1,984 homes for 4,643 residents being enclosed in what turned out to be highly flammable safety netting, the Hong Kong authorities have identified this as the primary cause and conduit of the fire that engulfed seven of those towers in flame for nearly two days and nights.
In contrast, in the immediate weeks after the Grenfell Tower fire, politicians including David Lammy and the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, backed by journalists who had never set foot on a council estate, loudly proclaimed that all post-war council estates were inherently and structurally unsafe and should therefore be demolished. This lie did two things. On the one hand, it sought to recoup a disaster caused by the UK’s estate regeneration programme, which is driven by the profit motives of replacing social housing with market-sale residential properties and shared-ownership schemes, into an advertisement for that programme; and, on the other, it occluded the actual technical, management and policy causes of the fire. As a result, more than eight years later, as of November 2025 an estimated 2,872 buildings 11 metres and more in height in the UK remain covered with the same or similar cladding systems to that which turned Grenfell Tower into an inferno, with leaseholders burdened with the cost of their removal or unable to sell their properties, and tenants living, still, under the threat of another fire.
In contrast, the Hong Kong authorities, having identified the material cause of the fire in Wang Fuk Court fire, immediately ordered the removal of scaffolding safety nets from every building in Hong Kong. This immense task, which was carried out on around 420 buildings with only a few exempted, had removed netting from some 200 building sights by 6 December, a mere 10 days after the fire
Not only that, but in response to investigators finding that sub-standard, non-flame-retardant nets had been deliberately concealed from inspectors at the Wang Fuk Court restoration project, and that contractors at other estates had allegedly faked their net-testing certificates, 50,000 new scaffolding nets, costing HK$170 each, have been procured by Hong Kong’s Construction Industry Council. This increased price includes fees for laboratory tests of the fire-retardance of the material under a new, legally binding regulatory regime. Issued by the Buildings Department within two weeks of the fire, this requires contractors to collect samples from every batch of scaffold netting to be sampled on-site and certified safe by appointed labs before it can be installed. In addition, contractors must now appoint a third party to select random samples from every batch of netting for testing at approved laboratories, with non-compliant batches traced back to their manufacturers. If scaffolding nets have been in place for a year, new tests must be conducted. All this has been done within 6 weeks of the fire.
3. Corporate lobbying
Almost as importantly, the Hong Kong authorities have identified what did not cause the fire. For some time now, there has been pressure to ban the use of bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong, which is unique to the city and has become a symbol of its identity. However, following several accidents in which badly attached and bound bamboo has fallen apart and construction workers have fallen to their deaths, there have been claims that bamboo is inherently unsafe and that it should be replaced by steel scaffolding as used in the rest of China and the West. In reality, this has as much basis in truth as the claim that post-war housing estates in the UK are inherently unsafe, which was promoted by organisations like Policy Exchange, the neoliberal think tank that writes much of the UK’s housing policy. Bamboo is not only immensely strong and light, allowing it to be used in all sorts of constructions that, for example, protect pedestrians from falling debris, but it is also flame-retardant. Although, under the immense heat in the Wang Fuk Court fire, bamboo will combust, it is unlikely to do so when not wrapped in 31-floors of flammable netting, and was not, therefore, in itself the cause of the spread of the fire. Indeed, as the photograph illustrating this article shows, even after two days of conflagration, much of the bamboo scaffolding remains in place around the towers.
I do not know, but I would not be surprised to hear, that the lobbying to have bamboo banned as scaffolding, which last year resulted in the Development Bureau requiring 50 percent of new building works to adopt metal scaffolding, comes from producers of metal scaffolding, who would win immensely lucrative contracts in Hong Kong if bamboo were abandoned. It would also, in a single blow, put out of work the highly skilled scaffolders who have learned the art of erecting and tying together bamboo scaffolding. As an architect acquaintance at the University of Hong Kong told ASH after the Wang Fuk Court fire, he has lived in Hong Kong for 27 years and has never seen bamboo scaffolding ignite. Just as it was the ACM (aluminium and composite material) cladding system that set the homes in the reinforced concrete Grenfell Tower on fire, so it was the plastic safety netting that set the Wang Fuk Court towers on fire. Today, across Hong Kong, the plastic netting has been taken down and bamboo scaffolding continues to be used; while in the UK, it took five years for the Government, in June 2022, to ban metal composite materials (MCM) with an unmodified polyethylene (PE) core being used on new buildings, while buildings already clad with these highly flammable materials continue to represent a fire risk to those living or working in them.
4. Material and Structural Failures
With the rapid and accurate identification of the immediate cause of the fire and the arrest of those individuals on charges of being responsible for its failures, the Hong Kong Government has equally rapidly been able to move to identify and change the bureaucratic causes of these failures. The key point of contention is whether the construction company given the contract for the refurbishment of Wang Fuk Court, Prestige Construction and Engineering, was using protective netting with fire-retardant coating, and if not, why not.
The Hong Kong authorities have initiated a testing programme not only of the netting used on Wang Fuk Court but also of thousands of samples from shipments of netting destined for 418 building projects across Hong Kong, to establish whether it is fire retardant, whether it ever was, or whether its exposure to the elements, in situ or before use, has corroded the coating. Like the Grenfell Tower fire, the immediate cause of the fire in Wang Fuk Court was the combination of highly flammable materials used in what created, in their application — temporarily in the refurbishment of Wang Fuk Court, permanently in the cladding of Grenfell Tower — a chimney effect that transferred a localised fire to the rest of the building and, in Wang Fuk Court complex, the rest of the buildings with such great speed.
It’s a measure of the speed with which the fire spread that, of the 161 bodies that have been identified, 70 were discovered in Wang Cheong House, where the fire started, 82 in Wang Tai House, the adjacent tower and the next to ignite, and 6 in the next three towers, with the location of three more bodies unconfirmed. Two more towers also caught fire but with no resulting casualties, and one tower to the north of Wang Cheong House was spared by the strong offshore breeze that blew south-west across the estate that day. This suggests that, so rapid was the spread of the fire through the protective netting and even between adjacent blocks, that there was not sufficient time to warn residents in their homes until the first two blocks were already engulfed in flames to such an extent that it was impossible or difficult to escape. This was not helped by the fact that the fire alarm system either was not working or had been turned off to allow workers on the refurbishment to enter and exit the buildings more easily.
As I said, the fire started around 2pm on a Wednesday, but nearly 40 percent of residents were aged 65 years and above and many can be expected to have been in their homes. As with the Grenfell Tower fire, therefore, it wasn’t the incidence of a fire, which might be expected on albeit poorly-managed residential construction sites in which workers and resident throw smoking cigarette butts into piles of construction waste, but rather the rapidity with which it spread that was the cause of the high mortality rate, and this spread was due to the materials used and their application to the respective towers. So why was such a dangerous material being used to clad eight 31-storey buildings housing so many people in such close proximity to each other?
5. Corruption and Compensation
I don’t know as much about Hong Kong’s building industry as I do about the building industry in the UK to answer this, and it would be foolish for me to speculate. What I can and will say is that the Hong Kong Government and media appear to be open about trying to identify the bureaucratic and regulatory failings that led to the material causes of the fire being in place at Wang Fuk Court on 27 November, 2025.
The Labour Department inspected Wang Fuk Court 16 times between July 2024 and November 2025, issuing 6 improvement notices and taking 3 prosecution actions against the contractor for unsafe work undertaken at height. However, since its focus is on occupational safety, the Department usually examines whether protective scaffolding nets are broken rather than fire retardant. Similarly, the Buildings Department oversees structural integrity and checks the compliance of approved plans and construction materials; while the Fire Services Department focuses on fire evacuation and safety equipment like alarms and extinguishers, and would regard the protection nets as construction materials. Both the Labour Department and Buildings Department have a code of practice requiring protective netting to have ‘appropriate fire-retardant properties in compliance with a recognised standard’, but authorities do not require test reports to be submitted. Contractors rely on net suppliers to supply certificates of these reports, but they do not independently verify them. What is needed, therefore, is to establish clear guidelines defining the roles, duties and responsibilities of different departments, most likely by the Housing Bureau, which is responsible for formulating, coordinating, and overseeing Hong Kong’s overall housing policy.
This isn’t to say that there is no evidence of corruption in the causes of the Wang Fuk Court fire, or that the Hong Kong authorities haven’t acted to arrest those suspected of being guilty. 6 men from the company responsible for the fire alarm system at the estate made false declarations to the Fire Services Department that the alarms would not be deactivated during the renovation. They have been arrested. A Shandong-based manufacturer of scaffolding netting in mainland China is alleged to have falsified safety certificates for materials used in housing renovation projects in Hong Kong, claiming its product were certified by the National Quality Inspection and Testing Centre for Protective Equipment in Beijing. Hong Kong authorities have launched a criminal investigation into the case.
The main contractor for the refurbishment of Wang Fuk Court, Prestige Construction and Engineering, has previously been accused of bid-rigging, a practice by which companies collude in submitting non-competitive bids so that the winner of the tender, who awards the other bidding companies with cash payoffs or subcontracts, is awarded the contract at an artificially raised price. And, indeed, the contract for Wang Fuk Court was $HK336 million, the highest of the three tenders. There are other accusations of corruption in both the procurement process and the management, monitoring and carrying out of the renovation, which I am unable to verify or comment upon as I was the Grenfell Tower fire. In the wake of the fire, however, the Owners’ Corporation is seeking to terminate the contracts with both Prestige Construction and Engineering and its consultant, Will Power Architects. Both companies are now under investigation by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which, as of 14 January, 2026, has arrested 14 people on suspicion of corruption relating to the Wang Fuk Court fire.
In contrast to this openly conducted investigation into the bureaucratic failings of the state and the publicly demonstrated accountability of those suspected of corruption, the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry began by excluding any investigation into the political, policy and management causes that put in place the material and structural causes of the fire in London. As a result, the inquiry said nothing about the nationwide estate regeneration programme under which the fatal cladding of Grenfell Tower was implemented. It said nothing about the financial motivations for cladding the tower, which ASH established was undertaken for cosmetic reasons as part of the council’s plan to realise the latent value uplift of the land on and around the Silchester housing estate. It said nothing about the three successive Ministers for Housing who, for four years, sat on the 2013 warnings and recommendations of the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group in response to the Lakanal House fire in 2009, which included that sprinklers be retrofitted in residential tower blocks in the UK. It said nothing about the outsourcing of fire safety regulation and compliance to private contractors for the lowest possible tender that came directly from guidance from the Minister of State for Policing and the Fire Service, Brandon Lewis. Nothing was said about local authorities outsourcing the management of their housing stock to privatised management structures like Tenants Management Organisations run by predatory housing associations whose driving motive is cutting costs and increasing profits rather than the safety of residents. Nothing was said about these and the other causes of the material and structural conditions that caused the Grenfell Tower fire, and which are in place on every other social housing estate in the UK.
Doubtless there is corruption in the Hong Kong building industry as there is in London’s, the latter of which leads the world in demonstrating how a crisis of housing affordability can be turned into vast profits for builders, housing associations, developers, financers and speculators in that crisis; but there is no comparison between the responses to that corruption and the failures of the state by the Government of Hong Kong and that of the United Kingdom. The Government of the former has announced that surviving residents made homeless by the Wang Fuk Court fire will have their taxes waived for 2024-25, and that it would pay for their rent, rates and utilities. And authorities have already identified an existing building site in Tai Po previously reserved for public housing to build subsidised housing for the residents made homeless by the fire. These will be given priority for the subsidised homes, made eligible to live in public housing, or have their property rights for the destroyed flats purchased by the Hong Kong Government, allowing them to purchase another property elsewhere. And the living allowance for every affected household has been doubled from HK$50,000 (US$6,410) to HK$100,000.
Compare this to the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire who, three years after seeing their homes go up in flames, were still living in temporary accommodation. Or to the blaming by politicians and journalists of everyone from residents for not leaving Grenfell Tower earlier to the London Fire Brigade for following fire safety procedure in telling them to stay put. Above all, in the weeks and months after the Grenfell Tower fire, the 72 deaths were turned into a punching bag for the competing parliamentary aspirations of the political parties in Britain’s Mother of all Parliaments. I wrote at the time that the Grenfell Tower fire was like a mirror: the political decisions that created the conditions for the disaster to happen were reflected in the responses to it.
6. Political exploitation
Immediately after the Grenfell Tower fire, ASH was approached by a wide range of journalists and filmmakers, including BBC Home Affairs, Panorama, Channel 4 News, the Financial Times, RT News, Al Jazeera, the London Review of Books and Novara Media, who wanted to interview us about the causes of the fire. The Labour Party, which is the main implementor of the UK’s council estate regeneration programme, particularly in London, had quickly moved to argue that the cause of the fire was the Conservative Government’s programme of fiscal austerity. This had long been Labour’s excuse for demolishing estates in boroughs run by Labour-run councils.
Indeed, spurred on by the Grenfell disaster, the next month ASH identified 237 council and social housing estates in London that, since 1997, had undergone, were undergoing, or were targeted with a regeneration scheme that had or would result in the privatisation of the housing, either by stock transfer to a housing association or by its refurbishment at a cost that financially prohibited the residents from returning; in the demolition of the housing and their redevelopment as a mix of affordable-rent, shared-ownership and market-sale properties; and in the resulting social cleansing from the estate of the majority of the existing residents. Of these, 195 estates were in London’s 21 Labour-run boroughs.
As an architectural practice, we were committed to identifying the technical, management and policy causes of the fire, and rejected Labour’s deliberately inaccurate claim that it was caused by central government cuts to council budgets. This lie was designed to draw attention away from Labour’s own leading role in the estate regeneration programme and place the fault of the fire with the Conservative-run council in the borough in which the Grenfell Tower fire had happened. It was, in other words, the Labour Party’s attempt to politicise the deaths and losses to their own parliamentary ends.
The fire in Wang Fuk Court occurred eleven days before the Hong Kong Legislative Council election that was held Hong Kong on 7 December, 2025; and, undoubtedly, candidates for election quickly began to promise voters that their first priority would be to change policy to ensure that Hong Kong housing is safe, to reform insurance claims and to rehouse survivors. In London, it is overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, the working class that live in council and social housing, and particularly on the estates in which the tower blocks proliferate. In Hong Kong, by contrast, 45.7 percent of the population of 7.5 million lived in 2022 in some form of public housing, which is almost entirely composed of tower blocks; and the remainder of the private housing is also largely composed of high-rise apartment buildings. As part of the former, Wang Fuk Court is not public-rental housing but a subsidised government home-ownership scheme. This is, in fact, far more common than public-rental housing in China, where an extraordinary 93% of the population of 1.4 billion people own their own home, outright or as mortgagor. In Hong Kong, in contrast, which has been subjected to speculation in housing as in the West, homeownership is only around 50 percent, the same as in the UK. It was under the Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme, which requires owners to pay for the maintenance of their homes, that Wang Fuk Court was undergoing the refurbishing of the external cladding of its walls, which it seems suffered from water ingress. The fire, therefore, represented far more of a threat to far more Hongkongers than the Grenfell Tower fire was to Londoners, in which, in contrast, only 11 percent lived in blocks of more than six storeys in 2021, with the rest living in low-rise residential blocks and individual housing.
Despite this, there was a far more dignified response to the Wang Fuk Court fire in Hong Kong than the politicisation of the Grenfell Tower fire in London. This has partly to do with the control that the CPC exerts over Hong Kong, where candidates from whatever political party put forward for election have to be preapproved as ‘patriots’ by the Chinese Government. This says something, I think, about the division in China between the remit of politicians, who are elected to administer the state apparatus rather than to seek to obtain control over it, and the purview of the CPC, which is there to oversee the running of the state. It also tells us something about some of the reactions of the Hong Kong Government to the Wang Fuk Court fire.
7. Sedition and the State
Finally, there is the issue of the heavy-handed reaction of Hong Kong authorities to citizens initiating their own responses to the disaster. Academics speculating on the causes of the fire have been forced to issue clarifications that in effect are retractions; but perhaps the most blatant example was the University of Hong Kong student who started a petition calling for an independent inquiry into possible corruption as a cause of the fire, a review of construction oversight and government accountability for its impact. In response to this he was arrested for ‘seditious intention’ and detained for two days before being released.
When I read about this arrest I was surprised, because in my two years of observing the actions, statements and responses of the Chinese government to the litany of provocations they receive from the West, they have always conducted themselves with restraint, caution, intelligence and considerable awareness of how their actions are perceived or can be represented by hostile agents. Indeed, compared to the woke activists running the European Union and the lunatics in the White House, Beijing, together with the Kremlin, strike me as the only adults left in global diplomacy, without whom we would already be in a Third World War. Arresting a University of Hong Kong student, therefore, struck me as unnecessary, heavy-handed, and providing ammunition for Western commentators to drag out the stereotypes about communist authoritarianism, which they dutifully did in the UK, USA, France, Australia, Japan and Qatar. Indeed, I would not be surprised to learn that the arrest was the decision of an overzealous subordinate trying to curry favour with Beijing, and who subsequently received a sharp rap on the knuckles for his public relations gaff.
As it is, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR ordered a judge-led independent investigation into the fire to address not only safety requirements and standards for building materials but also the role and responsibilities of regulators and the relevant legislation to enforce them. If necessary, it can establish a Commission of Inquiry with more powers to conduct criminal probes into culpability. The investigation started on 5 February, 2026, ten weeks after the fire, and the coroner’s inquiry and criminal investigation are already underway. Again, compare this to the extraordinary delay to criminal charges for the Grenfell Tower fire, which are only expected to be made this year at the earliest, with trials set for 2027, a decade after the disaster.
There is another reason, however, behind this arrest and the warnings issued by the Chinese Government to foreign news agencies and hostile external forces that unfounded accusations about corruption in Hong Kong’s administration would fall under the National Security Law. China, or more accurately the Communist Party of China, does not recognise the existence of civil society. For the CPC, the state oversees every aspect of Chinese society, including its immense private and corporate sector, and civil organisations not aligned with the state represent a challenge to its authority. Calling for an independent inquiry, by definition, implies that an official inquiry conducted by the Government is in some respect corrupt or subject to other criteria than establishing the truth and seeing justice done. That, in the judgement of the CPC, is sedition. In China, one can criticise a state body or representative for not doing their job correctly or well, and one can lobby the Government to see carried out a task the state isn’t or isn’t doing well; but one cannot criticise the integrity of the Chinese Government or the Communist Party of China.
Whatever you think of this position, there are several very good justifications for the CPC and the Government of Hong Kong taking it. The National Endowment for Democracy, a Congress-funded arm of the CIA committed to regime change in foreign countries and in particular to ‘countering communism’, has admitted it spent millions of dollars on programmes that led to the so-called ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in Hong Kong in 2014. In 2019, the Chinese Government made the same accusation against US influence on the so-called ‘democracy’ protests in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. Although many Hongkongers don’t see it this way, fortunately for Hong Kong both these protests failed.
Following the successful but equally CIA-manufactured ‘Maidan Revolution’ of 2014 — the same year as the one manufactured, without success, in Hong Kong — Ukraine was installed with a puppet government that, by 2023, under the Presidency of Washington’s stooge, Volodymyr Zelensky, had handed its natural resources and state assets over to US asset managers, while its fiscal policies, trade tariffs, tax rates, public spending, employment laws, media autonomy, human rights and political freedoms have all been subjected to the Washington Consensus dictated by the IMF, the World Bank and the US Department of the Treasury. It is not by chance that the CIA manipulated the disaffected youth of the Ukraine and Hong Kong into protesting against the two greatest threats to US global hegemony, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, and that they did so in the same year. A decade later, apart from the areas conquered by Russia, the Ukraine, in effect if not in name, is now a colony of the USA. There is one thing, and one thing only, standing between Hong Kong and a similar fate, and that is the People’s Republic of China.
In the UK, as across the West, protests by so-called ‘grass roots’ activists, from the corporate-funded Black Lives Matter and attacks on women by Trans activists to Just Stop Oil road blocks and the Free Palestine demonstrations, have become a front for the manipulation of public perception and the justification of government policies. As it observes the West’s decline into populist authoritarianism, Beijing has grounds for arresting foreign journalists and pro-Western Hong Kong activists using the fire in Tai Po to recreate the protests of 2019 and 2014. Looking at past ‘Colour Revolutions’ — successful and unsuccessful — in Yugoslavia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2005), Kyrgyzstan (2005), Belarus (2006), Moldova (2009), Tunisia (2010), Egypt (2011), Libya (2011), Syria (2011), Russia (2012), Venezuela (2014), North Macedonia (2016), Armenia (2018), Kazakhstan (2022) and Bulgaria (2025), or in Iran today, from which China exports 13 percent of its oil, the Communist Party of China is right to be wary of attempts by foreign forces, primarily the unfailingly hostile hawks in Washington and Brussels, to use the deaths of 168 Hongkongers to undermine the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ constitutional principle by which Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will be governed until 2047.
On 3 January, 2026, US forces kidnapped the President of the Republic of Venezuela, a sovereign state from which China exported 3 percent of its oil, and whose oilfields have now been taken into the control of the USA, a violation of international law that has been denounced by Xi Jinping. With Washington threatening to turn Taiwan, to which the USA approved a US$11 billion arms sale last December, into another Ukraine, and given the support the West has given to the demand for Uyghur autonomy in China’s oil- and gas-rich Xinjiang Region since 2009, Beijing is right to be wary of Hong Kong being turned into another outpost of US imperialism.
The Wang Fuk Court fire is a man-made disaster that has caused the largest loss of life from fire in Hong Kong since the Wing On warehouse fire in 1948, and will scar the lives of thousands of people, survivors, the bereaved, firefighters and witnesses; and I hope those responsible are brought to justice both as punishment for their crimes and to deter their repetition. Meanwhile, Downing Street, under the current Labour Government and its successors, could look and learn from the Hong Kong Government about how to respond swiftly and effectively to the next mass loss of life from fire in a residential tower block in the UK.
Simon Elmer is the Head of Research for Architects for Social Housing. His recent books include Case Studies in Estate Regeneration: Demolition, Privatisation, Social Cleansing (2025); The Housing Crisis: Finance, Legislation, Policy, Resistance (2025); and Architecture is Always Political: A Communist History (2024); and with Geraldine Dening, Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022), For a Socialist Architecture: Under Capitalism (2021); and Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018).
A Communist in Hong Kong 