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The authorities quickly arrested critics demanding accountability, signaling an expansive use of the security law to silence dissent over nonpolitical tragedies.
Dec. 3, 2025Updated 6:04 a.m. ET
Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades had barely been extinguished when the city’s authorities began working to contain something else: public anger at the government.
National security police have arrested at least two people for demanding more government accountability in the blaze that engulfed seven apartment towers and killed at least 159 people, with another 31 people unaccounted for on Wednesday.
One of the people arrested was Kenneth Cheung, a former elected district official who posted criticism on Facebook of the authorities’ response to the fire, which started last Wednesday and lasted more than 24 hours. He was accused of inciting hatred against the government online. The other was Miles Kwan, a 24-year-old university student who handed out fliers near the fire site calling for an independent probe into the disaster. The police declined to comment on their arrests.
The authorities’ swift crackdown on expression suggested that they were acutely aware of the risk that last week’s disaster could fuel a fresh political reckoning in a city that was engulfed with antigovernment protests in 2019. The scale of the disaster has already laid bare likely failures in oversight and preparedness that allowed substandard and flammable materials to be used in construction at the Wang Fuk Court housing estate, and for alarm systems to fail.
Hong Kong is confronting the grim reality of a fire so devastating that investigators recovered remains too charred to immediately identify. Yet in this moment of collective grief and shock, Beijing’s national security office released an unusually combative warning on Wednesday, accusing “hostile foreign forces” of exploiting the tragedy and vowing punishment “no matter how far away” they may be.
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