Think twice before sending people messages of concern if we fear they’re caught in a disaster

The towers’ netting, which covers Hong Kong buildings like giant mosquito nets when refurbishment is underway, turned out to be made of highly flammable synthetic material. Each of the blocks enveloped by the blaze was 30 storeys high. Even though 2,000 firemen had rushed to the site, it took from Wednesday evening to Friday, 28 November, to douse the fire. At least 151 people died; the city declared three days of mourning earlier this week.

I happened to be in Hong Kong last week on a work trip. Yet, I was unprepared for the flurry of texts I received from friends, either commiserating about the tragedy or concerned for my safety. It was another reminder that in the age of 24-hour television and social media, bad news not only travels fast but has a distortive effect.

The public housing complex in Tai Po was some 30km away from the financial district where the office I was visiting was located. The telecasts that reach us in our living rooms and via horrifying videos on social media connect us, but also leave us disconnected. After all, even a cursory reading of the fire’s details would have made clear that the calamity occurred in a gargantuan housing complex built by the government, far from the city centre where most business travellers work and stay.

I could not have been, both metaphorically and physically, further from these terrifying scenes of urban dystopia.

As the fire broke out, I was listening to a gifted group of American musicians in central Hong Kong. The lead violinist was so dynamic that my primary concern was that he not break a string during the Mendelssohn string quartet.

I was not, like Emperor Nero, fiddling while Rome burned, but it is an unsettling memory of how privilege and happenstance can put us a world away from tragedies in the cities we inhabit.

Far from residing in a public housing complex, I was a guest in a 21st floor penthouse where my only duty was being an occasional play date for the part poodle, part schnauzer dog because my friends were away.

My first sense that something was amiss was when, walking back after a late dinner, a friend and I were courteously stopped for less than a minute by Hong Kong police telling us their “boss,” the city’s de facto mayor, needed to leave his official residence. We were near the gate and watched as he departed at around 11pm.

The reaction of friends as far away as New York and Bengaluru reminded me of a conversation with Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, two decades ago.

Martel had argued that the 24-hour surround sound of TV coverage made us all as jumpy as deer when a predator is nearby and prone to hyper anxiety. The US attack on Iraq had just started, which meant everyone in the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong was highly agitated. Yet, as Martel wryly observed, no one there “was going to die by being hit by a Scud missile.”

But little did we both know that a highly infectious virus was about to cause a Blade Runner-style tragedy. An epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) broke out in the spring of 2003. Had news of its spread in southern China not been censored, it would have saved many lives in Hong Kong.

‘If it bleeds, it leads’ has long been an unfortunate rule of foreign news coverage. This has its virtues when we respond to such stories with constructive empathy by sending donations to international agencies dealing with disasters or observing health protocols, as in the case of Sars and Sars-CoV-2, the virus behind the covid pandemic that brought the world to a standstill less than two decades later.

But, missing in the global coverage of the Hong Kong blaze was the fact that despite the city’s incredible wealth, the Hong Kong government has public housing of a quality that does not compare favourably with, say, Singapore’s. This was true when Hong Kong was a British colony and has remained the case since 1997, when Britain turned it over to China. Even London, where a fire at a public housing estate in 2017 cast a similar spotlight on inadequate maintenance and safety standards, has better public housing.

Despite persistent fiscal deficits, the Hong Kong government has an accumulated fiscal surplus of US $70 billion, so it could spend more on housing and pensions. But the city-state has long had the priorities of a plutocracy. It halved the duty on wine in 2007, only coincidentally perhaps because the financial secretary then had one of the world’s finest wine collections, before abolishing it the following year.

As a journalist, I may observe such contradictions, but I am not immune to them.

I was terribly saddened by the floods in Sri Lanka, whose capital I regard as a second home. I sent a belated flurry of worried texts to friends in Colombo. One had lost contact for a day with his parents because of power cuts, while another had had no power for days at the hotel he runs in the hills above Kandy.

As if dealing with a calamity wasn’t trouble enough, they were interrupted by a need to respond to the hyper-anxiety of someone reading the news too closely.

The author is a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.