As Hong Kong reckons with worst fire in decades, many see echoes of 2019

The tragedy has rekindled some of the mistrust and divisions in Hong Kong that erupted as a result of the devastating housing estate fire that claimed the lives of at least 159 people.

On November 26, the city watched horrifiedly as the fire started at Wang Fuk Court and quickly spread to seven of the complex’s eight towers. According to official reports, many residents were trapped inside because the alarms were malfunctioning.

After burning for more than 40 hours, Wang Fuk Court is on track to be one of the worst fires ever to occur, with 176 people killed in the blaze that started in 1948. However, the casualties rate have kept rising since the fire was extinguished on November 28.

Many Hong Kongers have never considered the scale.

This is a downtown area, not a small village in the middle of nowhere. We wouldn’t have anticipated that this would have happened, Issie, an educator who works in Wang Fuk Court’s Tai Po district, told Al Jazeera.

“This is a completely unthinkable situation. We anticipated that the government would have “put out the fire.”

Hong Kongers quickly mobilized following the fire’s eruption, when they distributed food, water, and shelter to young protesters despite not always agreeing with them. This is unlike the protests of 2019, which have taken place since.

As other residents of the housing estate’s 4, 000-plus residents were quickly gathered online assistance databases, including clothing, food, and other supplies, in Tai Po.

A petition was then released calling for “four demands” of government accountability in response to the protest’s “five demands, not one less” slogan. More than 10,000 people signed the petition, according to local media, before it was eventually removed.

In a striking visual similarity to the 2019 protest artwork “Lennon Walls,” handwritten notes adorned the fire’s victims.

A Hong Kong professor with experience with the city’s governance structure told Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity because of concerns for the impact on their careers, that “mobilization is in Hong Kong’s “DNA.”

Because it was meant to be a significant renovation project, “people couldn’t explain why that happened.” He claimed that the renovation project, which was carried out to make the building structure and the residents safer, ended in tragedy.

Athena Tong, a visiting research fellow from Hong Kong and a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, shared the sentiment that the government was slow to act.

According to Tong, “the fact that society, the regular citizens, needed to mobilize at that scale to help with relief demonstrates that there is no trust in the government’s competence,”

Hong Kongers began to question the government’s prompt response online, including a suggestion from early experts and officials that Wang Fuk Court’s bamboo scaffolding, a custom in Hong Kong construction, should be replaced with metal.

Later, fire investigators determined that Styrofoam blocks and subpar mesh netting were the main culprits.

However, some of the discontent stems from the deep existential questions that the protests in 2019 raised about Hong Kong’s future, according to observers.

As a number of grievances began to surface, some of which date back to the city’s 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty, the protests erupted into a widespread antigovernment movement in 2019.

The issue ranged from whether Beijing was backing off with its commitments to the former British colony’s “high degree of autonomy” until 2047 under the “one country, two systems” agreement with China to how the local leader of Hong Kong would be chosen. Some people were concerned about the future of Hong Kong’s distinctive identity and culture.

By contrast, pro-government Hong Kongers and Chinese officials perceived the protests as a city ebbing into pieces, possibly with the support of the US government, who wanted to destabilize Hong Kong for their own reasons.

Hong Kong was temporarily at a standstill for months as a result of the protests, but as a result, COVID-19 containment laws started to become in effect in 2020. Beijing passed legislation that made it next to impossible for large-scale protests in the middle of 2020.

The government’s response in 2019 and 2025, according to Issie, the resident of Hong Kong.

These things wouldn’t have happened before, she said, “especially when it comes to people being critical of their policies, and even this time when people were trying to help.”

A Hong Kong government spokesman earlier this week claimed that “foreign forces, anti-China, and destabilizing forces” were using “seditious pamphlets” to “maliciously smear the rescue work, instigate social division and conflict to undermine the society’s unity” in a language that was strikingly reminiscent of its 2019 remarks.

According to China’s state-run Global Times newspaper, a “small number of external hostile forces” were attempting to “reverse the tragedy and “replica tactics from the anti-extradition bill unrest” in 2019 to obstruct rescue and recovery efforts.

According to local media reports, Hong Kong police have detained at least 15 people on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with the fire, and have also detained at least three others on suspicion of sedition and “attempting to incite discord” in response to the arrests.

According to local media, Miles Kwan, a university student, and former district councillor Kenneth Cheung, who was detained for leafleting, are among them.

The local government’s Executive Council member Ronny Tong claimed that there isn’t much information available about the sedition-related arrests, and that more evidence than criticism of the government would have helped to support the national security charges brought against them.

The law is the law, in our opinion, with a capital W. The police might err on the side of caution if someone violates the law at a sensitive time. The courts will be there to protect them if they overreacted, Ronny Tong said.

He claimed for Al Jazeera that it made sense for the government to reroute volunteers’ efforts to streamlined their work. The government provided a 100, 000 Hong Kong dollar ($12, 847) subsidy over the course of the past week, promising Wang Fuk Court residents would receive free housing until their homes were rebuilt.

Although only a small number of details have been made public, Hong Kong leader John Lee has also demanded an independent committee to look into the fire and review the building-work system in Hong Kong.

No government official had resigned as of Friday due to the deadly fire.

Source: Aljazeera