Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: A deadly apartment fire devastates Hong Kong, details emerge about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s role in a phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, and a video game becomes a Chinese soft-power hit.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: A deadly apartment fire devastates Hong Kong, details emerge about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s role in a phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, and a video game becomes a Chinese soft-power hit.
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Apartment Fire Devastates Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, a debate over construction safety and lack of regulatory enforcement has followed the apartment fire that claimed at least 156 lives last week. Hong Kong’s leader has ordered an investigation into the cause of the fire, and police have made several arrests of those suspected to be at fault.
But for many Hong Kongers, the tragedy also confirmed that the city’s once-prized freedoms have vanished. Local authorities responded to the fire much like their mainland counterparts would: by stifling civil society aid efforts and detaining critics.
The fire broke out last Wednesday in Wang Fuk Court, a high-rise public housing complex undergoing exterior renovations after a 2016 inspection found serious defects. The complex is located in a poor neighborhood, and around 40 percent of residents were over 65. Initial blame focused on the bamboo scaffolding, an inexpensive construction practice long used in Hong Kong that many residents quickly leapt to defend.
Authorities now say the culprit was substandard netting, which officials say the construction company concealed by wrapping higher-grade material around only the first floor of the building to pass inspection. Residents previously complained about the construction’s poor quality. Now, contractors at other sites have rushed to remove netting to avoid inspection requirements.
Construction fires are common in China, where projects are often rushed and poorly regulated. Last week’s fire echoed the deadly 2010 blaze in Shanghai and the 2009 inferno that engulfed Beijing’s unopened Television Cultural Centre during the Spring Festival.
Such catastrophes are not unique to authoritarian states. London’s 2017 Grenfell Tower fire—also involving substandard materials, subsidized housing, and years of ignored complaints—bore striking similarities to Wang Fuk Court. But unlike Grenfell, where intense media scrutiny and a major public inquiry followed, such independent investigations are no longer possible in Hong Kong.
Since the 2019 protests and the imposition of draconian national security laws, no public institution in Hong Kong can operate freely. Democratic mechanisms have been gutted, and political candidates must now adhere explicitly to Beijing’s line. The city’s response to the fire has confirmed Hong Kongers’ fears that the city’s political culture is now indistinguishable from that of the mainland.
Beijing’s national-security office in Hong Kong immediately warned that any attempt to exploit the disaster for so-called anti-China sentiment would be crushed. Police dismantled grassroots fundraising efforts and donation sites and replaced them with state-approved efforts. At least three people were arrested for signing a petition calling for an independent inquiry.
These tactics mirror long-standing practice on the mainland, where coverage even of high-profile disasters is quickly censored, critics are harassed or detained, and official inquiries tend to produce scapegoats rather than transparency.
And because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insists on controlling both public mourning and the investigative process, some disasters vanish from the historical record. There is no memorial, for instance, for victims of the 1994 theater fire in Karamay, Xinjiang—most of whom were children who died after local CCP leaders ordered that the cadres be allowed to exit first.
Central inspectors occasionally expose local cover-ups when officials try to dodge responsibility. But anyone who raises broader questions about governance or corruption, whether in Hong Kong or the mainland, quickly becomes a target.
What We’re Following
Trump-Takaichi call. The Wall Street Journal confirmed last Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s phone call to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was made at the behest of Chinese President Xi Jinping, as I suggested previously. Trump reportedly pressed Takaichi to accommodate China’s position on Taiwan—a stance that has strained China-Japan relations.
Tokyo, seeking to avoid friction with the White House, has denied the report. The strangeness of a U.S. president acting on Beijing’s behalf has gone largely unremarked on as press coverage fixates on Trump acting on Moscow’s behalf. But the revelation will deal a blow to the remaining China hawks in the Trump administration.
Instead, Trump’s affection for authoritarian leaders, and his weakness for flattery, is on full display.
Mining hazards. Amid all the coverage of China’s rare-earth monopoly, less attention has been paid to how unregulated mining remains in the country. Much of China’s mining sector operates illegally. Beijing maintains that two decades of safety campaigns have cleaned up the industry, but research suggests that these efforts often incentivized cover-ups rather than improvements.
Rare-earth mining suffers from similar problems. A state-backed consolidation drive has reduced the rampant smuggling that once accounted for as much as 30 percent of total production—in 2014, for instance, 28,000 tons were officially exported, while as many as 40,000 tons were smuggled—but dealers have quickly found new ways to evade tighter controls.
Nominally, rare-earth production is now concentrated in a handful of state-owned enterprises, yet these firms suffer from endemic corruption, even in highly sensitive sectors. Chinese-controlled firms have also pushed illegal mining abroad, especially to Myanmar, where China has even less ability to enforce regulations.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Tech and Business
U.K.-China ties. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has urged U.K. firms to do more business with China—a return to the familiar cycle in which a new leader briefly hopes that China can save Britain’s ailing economy, only for those hopes to be dashed by Beijing’s political intransigence or aggressive espionage.
Prime Minister David Cameron’s much-touted “golden era” of U.K.-China relations lasted barely two years before collapsing under the weight of China’s atrocities in Xinjiang and its reprisals against European critics. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm met a similar fate after Beijing imposed the national security laws in Hong Kong.
Starmer enters this cycle already dogged by concerns over Chinese espionage, following the humiliating—and still unexplained—implosion of a Westminster spying case. Given his knack for political missteps and his standing as one of the most unpopular prime ministers in recent British history, Starmer is unlikely to be a persuasive champion for closer ties with China.
Video game hit. China has gained another soft-power hit with the launch of the video game Where Winds Meet. The free-to-play Wuxia title from industry giant NetEase amassed more than 9 million downloads on PC and PS5 since its global release on Nov. 14.
Chinese firms own a significant share of the global gaming industry, but they have only recently produced major international hits, beginning with 2020’s Genshin Impact. These early successes tended to closely copy Japanese games, but the popularity of last year’s Black Myth: Wukong has sparked interest in the gaming community for Chinese content.
Two factors could still undermine that momentum: A potential increase in government scrutiny and censorship of video games and the global downturn of the broader industry post-pandemic. Chinese firms may be well positioned to survive only because they already saw mass layoffs during an earlier regulatory crackdown.
