On November 26, 2025, tragedy struck Hong Kong. Several high-rise apartment buildings in the Wang Fuk Court housing complex in the Tai Po district were struck by fire. More than 160 people were killed in the inferno, making it the most deadly in Hong Kong in decades. More than 2,600 individuals lost their homes, most of whom have lost virtually all their possessions.

The fire began on a lower level in one building and spread quickly. It’s clear that both corporate malfeasance and governance failures created the conditions for the tragedy.  The housing complex was undergoing renovations when the fire broke out and some of the cladding used by the renovation company was not fireproof, as required by law. Also, several fire alarms failed to go off.

Importantly, it is the first large-scale disaster since the imposition of the National Security Law (NSL) by Beijing in 2020. The government’s response to the tragedy makes clear that the NSL, passed in response to the historic 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, will be used to deal with political crises that have nothing to do with the protest movement.

The NSL is a central feature of Hong Kong’s law and governance

In most open societies, after a tragedy of this magnitude, people come together: they form support groups, create organizations to push their own government, and become more deeply engaged politically. Media does its part, reporting on what’s been done and what hasn’t, holding governments to account over foot-dragging or efforts to cover up damaging information.

None of that will happen in Hong Kong after this tragedy.

Prior to the 2019 protest movement, Hong Kong’s mostly liberal and open political system allowed disaster victims to press their government. Hong Kong’s semi-democratic Legislative Council allowed at least some legislators to bring those voices into the legislature itself, to weigh in on new laws and policies that could prevent similar tragedies. Now, the Hong Kong government has the tools it needs to crack down on those who seek to mobilise the public to demand transparency and accountability. 

Civil society has been treated as a latent security threat

Both the Hong Kong government and Beijing have used these tools, starting just days after the fire. On November 29, Beijing’s Office for Safeguarding National Security (OSNS) released a statement warning that ‘anti-China elements’ sought to use the tragedy to ‘incite social division and confrontation,’ and threatened those who ‘used disaster to disrupt Hong Kong’ with ‘severe punishment.’ The OSNS followed up with a similarly-worded statement on December 3, once again threatening those critical of the government’s response with criminal prosecution.

The Hong Kong government has issued its own thinly veiled threats. Speaking to reporters on December 2, Chief Executive John Lee stated that the Hong Kong government would not allow individuals to ‘exploit’ the tragedy, or ‘sabotage’ government relief efforts. Lee used the same phrase, ‘using disaster to disrupt Hong Kong,’ once again adopting Beijing’s talking points and even political slogans as his own.

Arrest and detention are being used to intimidate

The stern warnings from Beijing and Hong Kong have been matched with action by national security police through detention and arrest over their Tai Po activism or speech. On November 29, for example, police arrested 24-year-old student Miles Kwan after he handed out copies of a pamphlet demanding accountability for the deadly fire. Kwok’s pamphlet was eventually posted online as a petition, which gathered over 10,000 signatures in a single day. On December 2, solicitor and former pro-democratic party leader Bruce Liu was temporarily detained after he announced a press conference to call for a Commission of Inquiry into the disaster. The press conference was later cancelled.

It’s important to note that only one person detained or arrested for their peaceful advocacy or speech has been criminally charged. On December 9, political commentator Wong On-yin appeared in court after being  charged with divulging the details of a national security investigation, a crime under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO). Wong was also charged with sedition under the same law. Roughly six weeks after the blaze, none of the other three individuals have been charged with a national security crime. But merely threatening to use it may be enough, in most cases, to silence those who publicly challenge the government’s response to the fire. Others will see these initial arrests, and decide that they should remain quiet, to avoid the same fate.   

On December 12, an additional ten men, aged 20 to 25, were arrested for allegedly carrying out military-style drills at an industrial site near Tai Po. Two of them were later charged with subversion under the NSL. Given the lack of publicly available information about the case, it remains unclear whether the actions of these two men, or the larger group, would constitute a crime in other, rights-respecting jurisdictions.

Concerns about the scope and quality of the investigation

Arrests have been made in relation to the blaze, including members of the building complex’s senior management, and construction contractors who were responsible for repairs. But no government officials have yet been publicly disciplined or reprimanded.

The government will, of course, lead an investigation into the causes of the fire, but it won’t be pressured by outside groups to engage in a level of transparency that it finds undesirable. Chief Executive Lee has appointed a judge-led investigation committee, but it will apparently lack the investigative powers and greater autonomy of a statutorily created Commission of Inquiry. More importantly, perhaps, the government and Beijing will likely make decisions on their own as to who is held accountable for the tragedy, and what level of punishment they will face.

There are many problems with this approach, not least that it will lack sufficient public legitimacy. Many Hong Kongers simply won’t trust a process that is seen as overly controlled by a Chief Executive whose loyalties clearly lie with Beijing. But there’s an even bigger potential risk: without robust public participation and media oversight, will all of the regulatory concerns raised by the fire truly be exposed and addressed? Or will some questions, too sensitive or too embarrassing to the government, be swept under the rug?

One need not look too far to see the downsides of this approach playing out in practice. There’s a reason why Mainland China has suffered from perennial food and drug scandals over the years, involving everything from fake, chemical-laced eggs to exploding watermelons. Officials responsible for poisoned food and harmful drugs are indeed punished, in some cases even executed. But over time, the outcry dims, attention is diverted elsewhere, and the cycle of corruption begins again.

Above and beyond the immediate aftermath of the fire, the national security-focused response to the tragedy illustrates several key trends in Hong Kong politics, law, and governance.  

The NSL is here to stay

When the NSL first went into effect in mid-2020, virtually all of its initial targets were people and organisations associated with the 2019 protest movement. This included prominent targets such Jimmy Lai, as well as rank-and-file protesters whose only ‘crime’ was to take to the streets to demand democracy. More than five years later, however, the NSL and the national security apparatus are now all-purpose tools of political repression, to be deployed whenever needed.

This isn’t the first time that the NSL and other related laws have been used against non-protest movement targets. In 2021 the government deployed the colonial-era sedition law, then a part of the Crimes Ordinance, against critics of the government’s COVID-19 policies. And in 2025, the government used the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO) to threaten local conglomerate CK Hutchison over its moves to sell its Panama Canal ports holdings to the US-based firm Blackrock. The use of the national security regime in the aftermath of the Tai Po tragedy is both a continuation and a deepening of this trend. 

Civil society

It’s now clear that the Hong Kong government and Beijing want to keep Hong Kong’s once-vaunted civil society in a permanent state of relative weakness. As far as they are concerned, there will be no new mobilisation, no re-population of Hong Kong civil society with new groups focused on a new set of issues, no new generation of pro-democratic politicians and political parties. Instead, the Hong Kong government and Beijing will use the NSL to preserve the status quo, in which groups working on political issues are few and far between, and even those working on less-sensitive issues such as cultural preservation and poverty relief have to watch their step.  

The Legislative Council

The implications for Hong Kong’s governing institutions are also quite clear: the Legislative Council, for example, won’t be allowed to return to a more constituent-focused approach to its work, and it won’t be allowed to act as even a partial check on government. It will not play an important role in responding to this tragedy, or to any future ones. Instead, Legislative Councilors will keep their eyes firmly fixed on the political signals being sent by the Chief Executive and by Beijing. They are the two core constituencies that matter, and the people of Hong Kong themselves are a distant second.

The Judiciary

Last but not least, the staying power of the national security apparatus poses significant challenges for Hong Kong’s judiciary. As I and other researchers have documented, the courts have given the government pretty much everything it has demanded over the past five and a half years, delivering a steady stream of guilty verdicts in national security cases, with only two exceptions. The judiciary may have hoped to wait out the storm, and to return to the pre-2019 status quo ante once the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement ended. That was always a distant hope, as demonstrated since the Tai Po fire.

The courts need to find a new way to respond to national security cases, ones that at least begin to incorporate constitutional rights protections into national security verdicts. If they don’t, the Hong Kong government and Beijing will continue to use national security laws to limit the basic rights of the people of Hong Kong anytime they wish.

The international response: How to deal with Hong Kong’s permanent national security state?

For Western governments, Hong Kong’s transition from a liberal, if undemocratic, constitutional system into an illiberal and soft authoritarian one creates a real policy dilemma: what, if anything, can be done to influence Beijing and Hong Kong’s draconian implementation of the NSL and other national security laws?

Over the past five years, some governments , the U.S. chief among them, have focused on sanctions as a key policy tool to punish those officials responsible for using the NSL to crack down on rights activists, politicians, journalists, civil society activists, and others.

The focus on sanctions has meant that other potential policy responses have not received the attention that they deserve. In particular, I argue that Western governments should step up their funding support for exile civil society groups and media organisations that, in many cases, have taken the place of top Hong Kong-based outfits that were forced to close their doors after the NSL went into effect.

In the U.S., the funding situation has deteriorated dramatically. The first and second Trump administrations have slashed foreign aid funding including for democracy groups in Hong Kong, and seemed on track to almost entirely eliminate it. The administration also shut down Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, both of which had done stellar reporting on the national security crackdown, in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. A year later, some foreign aid funding remains in place, but the overall cuts to U.S. government funding have had a devastating impact: some organisations have shut down, while others continue to operate on a shoestring budget.

In 2026, Hong Kong exile groups that remain open should focus some of their efforts on pressing the U.S. Congress to restore China and Hong Kong human rights funding. These groups should also press Congress to take action on Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, so that these vital news organisations can fully reopen as soon as possible.

Conclusion

The Tai Po tragedy has exposed the permanence of Hong Kong’s transition from a semi-democratic open society governed by the rule of law, into a soft authoritarian system in which the government sets the terms of the debate, and the broader rules of the game. The national security regime that sprang up in response to the 2019 pro-democracy protests has morphed into a permanent and central feature of Hong Kong law and politics and will leave an indelible stain on Hong Kong’s constitutional order for years to come.

With U.S. funding for international human rights initiatives deeply diminished for the foreseeable future, other Western governments should step up as much as they can. As they do so, they will be offering a much-needed lifeline to activists, journalists, and lawyers whose expertise can still be deployed in support of the people of Hong Kong. As the Tai Po tragedy shows, their expertise is still very much needed.

Image: The Wang Fuk Court apartments in Tai Po, Hong Kong, November 30, 2025. Credit: FK8438/Wiki Commons. This image has been cropped.