The inferno that engulfed Wang Fuk Court residential compound in Hong Kong is still burning, but questions are already being asked about what the deadliest fire in more than 70 years means for Beijing’s grip on power in the city.
The death toll from the blaze, which tore apart seven of the eight high-rise apartment buildings in Wang Fuk Court, a residential compound home to 4,800 people, is still rising. Hundreds of people are still missing.
But as firefighters work to bring the fire under control and make progress with rescue efforts, anger is already swelling among Hongkongers about the causes of the fire.
The fire has also tapped into the social anxiety in Hong Kong around affordable housing, where sky-high property prices mean that many people live in tightly packed high-rise apartments that can become death traps when disaster strikes.
The last two paragraphs are entirely about the fire, and don’t engage with the anger at all - which was the subject of the headline.
It’s like I was watching a news segment where they stop reporting and cut to a talking head who started analyzing political responses to the fire.
How much Chinese companies are donating to relief efforts and the political parallels of an election being delayed (covid before, the fire now) are tangentially related, but in my opinion, that’s no longer focused on “Anger swelling in Hong Kong over deadliest fire in more than 70 years”.
Maybe that the government reactions don’t engage with the anger, is what makes those reactions worthy of inclusion? Actually, scratch that, whether or not those reactions do or don’t acknowledge the anger is irrelevant to whether or not they should be included. Those reactions are relevant to the article because they inform us of what the other involved parties are doing.
In this article those reactions at the end do not fit in with the main story of the angry people, because they don’t acknowledge that anger. I’d call them tone-deaf reactions, but a journalist isn’t allowed to write that (except in opinion pieces), so the journalist can only give those tone-deaf reactions as they were (+ provide some context about them, which I appreciated). That the anger of those people was so far only responded to with tone-deaf reactions, makes those tone-deaf reactions very relevant to the anger of the people.