When the towers of Wang Fuk Court turned into a seven-building inferno on Wednesday last week, killing 128 people, including a firefighter, Hong Kong officials promised investigations, pledged to review regulations and within hours issued a plan to replace bamboo scaffolding with steel. It sounded decisive. It was not.
The gestures are about political optics, not accountability. The tragedy was not caused by bamboo or by outdated laws. Flame-retardant netting is already required. Under Hong Kong’s Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme — which requires buildings more than 30 years old to undergo inspection every decade and compulsory repairs — the framework for proper supervision already exists: registered inspectors, registered contractors and statutory oversight.
The laws were there. What failed was the political will to enforce them.
Mandated renovations worth HK$330 million (US$42.4 million) at Wang Fuk Court exposed a sickness that has festered across Hong Kong’s property-maintenance sector. Renovation tenders routinely bear the same fingerprints: inflated bids, implausibly low consultant fees and owners pressured or manipulated into approving packages they cannot refuse once inspectors order repairs.
For more than a year, all eight towers sat shrouded in scaffolding and green netting while work crawled on. When the fire occurred, that netting became a vertical wick, carrying flames up 30 stories in minutes.
Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee (李家超) promised more reviews, but the disaster was not born of insufficient law. The netting used in the Wang Fuk Court was “certified,” yet it burned like fuel. Polystyrene foam boards on windows were never permitted. Alarms did not sound.
A similar scaffolding fire in Central District last month should have triggered inspections; none were ordered. Residents at Wang Fuk Court complained that workers smoked on the scaffolding and, alarmed by last month’s blaze, warned that the netting posed a serious fire hazard. Their warnings were not heeded.
In today’s Hong Kong, enforcing rules has become politically hazardous. Contractors with the right affiliations must not be disrupted. Cross-border suppliers tied to Chinese networks must not be scrutinized. Owners aligned with the patriotic establishment must not be challenged. Bureaucrats, shaped by the ethos of “patriots governing Hong Kong,” have absorbed the era’s lesson: Do what is politically correct, and little else.
If bamboo is the culprit, there is no need to trace the netting’s origin, verify certificates, examine Chinese suppliers, investigate contractors or probe party-linked networks that dominate the renovation economy. Blame bamboo, and the investigation can end without disturbing anyone powerful.
The residents did not die because bamboo burns. They died because a territory that once prided itself on world-class governance has allowed its institutions to rot. Journalists who once scrutinized procurement have been silenced, civic groups dissolved and directly elected district councilors purged. Regulators fear the consequences of challenging the connected.
Under the patriots-only system, Hong Kong’s bureaucracy has drifted from competence to obedience, from accountability to self-preservation and from serving the public to avoiding political risk. This is how governance collapses — through years of quiet refusals to do the job. The netting that burned through the night was only the first layer. Beneath it lies a deeper fire: a political order that has made oversight impossible and negligence routine.
Hong Kong did not lack the expertise to prevent the fire. It lacked the courage, conscience and integrity to stop it. The government must confront the rot — bid-rigging cartels, political protection and a governance model that punishes honesty — as the next disaster is already rising from another scaffold, shrouded in another netting, waiting for another spark.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong now living in Taiwan.
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