The Ghosts of Tai Po
Against the Tai Po skyline, the charred silhouettes of Wang Fuk Court’s towers stand as Hong Kong’s newest monuments to sorrow. Seven of the complex’s eight residential buildings, blackened and hollow, remind passersby each evening of November 26, 2025—the day when at least 160 people died, 79 were injured, and six vanished into smoke and ash. For over 43 hours, flames consumed what was supposed to be home, creating Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in nearly eight decades.
As the international news cycle moved on, Hong Kong was left to make sense of a tragedy that felt both shocking and grimly familiar. How does a modern city with stringent building codes, regular inspections, and advanced fire services lose seven residential towers and over 160 lives? The answer, some suggest, lies in a century-old parable about a man who believed everything was “close enough.”
The Life and Death of Mr. Chabuduo
In 1924, Chinese philosopher and diplomat Hu Shih penned a satirical story that would become one of modern China’s most famous parables. “The Life of Mr. Chabuduo” tells of a man whose surname literally means “close enough” or “more or less the same.” Mr. Chabuduo lives his entire life in a fog of approximation. He confuses white sugar for brown because the colors are similar. He misses his train by two minutes because the times are close enough. When keeping accounts, he writes one thousand where he means ten, shrugging that the difference hardly matters.
The story reaches its dark climax when Mr. Chabuduo falls gravely ill. His family, unable to find a doctor quickly, fetches a veterinarian instead. After all, both treat the sick—close enough. Mr. Chabuduo dies on the operating table, but even in his final moments, he remains philosophical: “Living or dead—aren’t they chabuduo?”
The story’s sting comes in its epilogue. After his death, Mr. Chabuduo is celebrated throughout China as a model citizen, praised for his flexibility, his lack of rigidity, his refusal to be overly conscientious about trivial details. Everyone, Hu Shih writes with bitter irony, aspires to be like Mr. Chabuduo.
Hu Shih wrote this parable because he believed the “chabuduo” attitude was holding China back. For him, modernity demanded precision—the exactitude of railway timetables, the rigor of properly kept accounts, the life-or-death difference between a doctor and a veterinarian. A century later, his parable has been invoked to make sense of Hong Kong’s man-made tragedy.
A Chronicle of Compromises
The Wang Fuk Court fire was not an act of God or an unforeseeable accident. It was the culmination of countless moments when someone decided that “close enough” was good enough.
The estate was undergoing a 330 million Hong Kong dollar renovation when the fire began on that dry, windy November afternoon. A Red Fire Danger Warning was in effect—conditions that should have triggered extra caution. Instead, the construction site had become a catalog of compromises:
Flammable expanded polystyrene foam boards, essentially Styrofoam, had been installed over windows. In a fire, these didn’t just burn—they became accelerants, feeding the flames that would consume seven towers. The construction safety netting covering the bamboo scaffolding failed to meet fire resistance standards, creating a flammable envelope around the buildings that promoted a deadly chimney effect, drawing fire upward at terrifying speed.
Perhaps most damningly, fire alarm systems had been intentionally disabled. The reason? Convenience. Workers needed to enter and exit buildings frequently, and the alarms were an annoyance. Some stairwell windows had been converted from glass to wood for the same reason—easier access mattered more than fire safety. When the blaze started, residents had no early warning. By the time they smelled smoke, escape routes were already compromised.
This wasn’t negligence born of ignorance. Wang Fuk Court residents had filed complaints with authorities ranging from the Labour Department to the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Government officials had visited the estate multiple times, with the most recent inspection occurring just one week before the fire. Yet nothing changed. The warnings were acknowledged, filed, and ultimately ignored. Close enough to proper oversight, perhaps, but not close enough to save 160 lives.
The Chabuduo Ecosystem
The metaphor of Mr. Chabuduo gains its power from how precisely it describes not individual failures but systemic ones. At Wang Fuk Court, “close enough” thinking operated at every level:
At the procurement stage, residents had protested the hiring of a maintenance company with a poor compliance record, alleging bid-rigging and corruption. Their concerns were dismissed. A contractor with a questionable safety history was close enough to a reputable one.
At the materials stage, foam boards and substandard netting were close enough to proper fire-resistant materials. They looked similar, cost less, and functioned adequately—until they didn’t.
At the operational stage, disabled alarms and wooden windows were close enough to a functioning safety system. After all, fires were rare, and convenience mattered for the daily work.
At the regulatory stage, inspections and acknowledged complaints were close enough to enforcement. Officials visited, took notes, perhaps issued warnings. But without real consequences, oversight became performance—the appearance of governance rather than its substance.
Even the fire’s spread followed a chabuduo logic. Hong Kong had seen several fires in 2025 involving bamboo scaffolding with construction safety nets—at Texaco Road, Chinachem Tower, and a University of Hong Kong dormitory. Each incident should have triggered a comprehensive review of construction fire safety standards. Instead, each was treated as an isolated event. The patterns were close enough to noticed, but not quite enough to demand action.
The Power and Peril of Cultural Metaphor
The Mr. Chabuduo comparison has gained traction in discussions of the Wang Fuk Court fire because it offers a familiar frame for understanding how so many things went wrong. It’s a story Hong Kong residents know, a critique with deep roots in Chinese intellectual history, a way to name the pattern behind the tragedy.
But cultural metaphors, however apt they may seem, carry risks.
First, there’s the danger of cultural essentialism. The chabuduo concept, originally penned as internal social criticism by a Chinese intellectual, has sometimes been weaponized as a stereotype—the idea that Chinese culture is inherently careless, that East Asians accept shoddy work, that this is simply “how things are” in Chinese societies. This flattens a complex critique into a racial or cultural character flaw.
The reality is that “close enough” thinking isn’t culturally specific. The Challenger space shuttle disaster resulted from engineers and managers accepting O-rings that were close enough to safe. The Grenfell Tower fire in London killed 72 people because flammable cladding was close enough to fire-resistant material. Financial crises erupt when risk assessments are close enough to accurate. Hu Shih’s parable resonates precisely because it describes a universal human tendency, not a unique cultural failing.
Second, cultural explanations can obscure structural causes. The Wang Fuk Court fire wasn’t the result of some abstract cultural attitude floating in the air. It was the product of specific, identifiable failures:
A procurement process that allegedly involved bid-rigging and corruption, suggesting the problem wasn’t cultural values but criminal misconduct. A regulatory system that received multiple complaints and conducted inspections but lacked either the authority or the will to enforce compliance. A construction industry operating under economic pressures that incentivize cost-cutting and reward the appearance of compliance over its reality. A political environment where, in the fire’s aftermath, volunteers who tried to help victims faced sedition-related arrests, reviving the mistrust from the 2019 protests and potentially chilling future civic action.
These are institutional problems that require institutional solutions—stronger enforcement mechanisms, genuine whistleblower protections, transparent procurement processes, independent oversight. Attributing the disaster to a cultural mindset of “close enough” risks treating these structural issues as inevitable cultural features rather than fixable systemic failures.
Third, the metaphor can become fatalistic. If this is just how Chinese culture works, if Hong Kong has inherited an attitude that sees precision as pedantry and flexibility as virtue, what hope is there for change? The metaphor, meant to illuminate, can instead obscure the agency and accountability necessary for reform.
The Useful Truth in the Metaphor
Yet for all these risks, the Mr. Chabuduo metaphor captures something important about the Wang Fuk Court fire that purely technical or legalistic analysis might miss. It names the psychological and social dynamics that allow catastrophe to unfold in slow motion, in plain sight.
Modern disasters rarely result from single dramatic failures. They emerge from the accumulation of small compromises, each one seeming reasonable in isolation. The foam boards saved money and looked adequate. Disabling alarms made work flow more smoothly. The contractor’s record wasn’t perfect, but they submitted the lowest bid. Each individual decision was, in its moment, defensible—close enough.
This is where the chabuduo metaphor proves its worth. It describes not individual incompetence but a cultural ecosystem where standards are seen as guidelines, where compliance is performed rather than practiced, where the difference between “adequate” and “safe” is treated as academic until it becomes tragic.
The metaphor also captures the social dimension of normalized deviance—the way groups and societies gradually adjust their standards downward. When everyone around Mr. Chabuduo praises his flexibility and mocks those who insist on precision, being careless becomes a virtue. When regulators visit but don’t enforce, when complaints are filed but ignored, when previous fires with similar causes don’t trigger systematic reform, the message is clear: close enough is actually fine. Until it isn’t.
Hong Kong’s Moment of Reckoning
In the weeks following the fire, Hong Kong has begun its reckoning. Multiple arrests have been made, including construction company executives. The government has moved to dissolve the owners’ corporation’s management committee, citing their inability to handle the complex post-fire situation. Investigations are underway into procurement processes, material standards, and regulatory oversight.
But investigations and arrests, while necessary, are not sufficient. The deeper question is whether Hong Kong will use this tragedy to address the systemic issues the chabuduo metaphor points toward, or whether the metaphor itself will become another form of “close enough”—a satisfying explanation that substitutes for structural reform.
Real change would require confronting uncomfortable truths. It would mean acknowledging that Hong Kong’s reputation for efficient governance and rule of law has, in some domains, become more appearance than reality. It would mean building regulatory systems with genuine enforcement power and protecting rather than prosecuting those who raise safety concerns. It would mean resisting economic pressures that incentivize cutting corners and creating procurement systems resistant to corruption.
Most fundamentally, it would mean rejecting the fatalism that cultural explanations can breed. The chabuduo attitude isn’t an immutable feature of Chinese civilization or Hong Kong society. It’s a pattern of behavior that emerges when institutions fail to maintain standards, when enforcement is inconsistent, when the consequences of cutting corners fall on others.
Hu Shih wrote his parable not to celebrate chabuduo thinking but to critique it, to argue that modern societies demand precision and that accepting approximation carries costs. His Mr. Chabuduo dies not because Chinese culture dooms him but because those around him—his family, his community—accept a standard of care that is fatally inadequate.
Beyond Metaphor
The charred towers of Wang Fuk Court will stand for some time as Hong Kong processes this tragedy and plans reconstruction. They are not merely the result of technical failures or regulatory gaps. They are monuments to what happens when “close enough” thinking pervades every level of a system—from procurement to construction, from inspection to enforcement.
The Mr. Chabuduo metaphor helps illuminate this pattern, but it cannot substitute for the hard work of institutional reform. The question now is whether Hong Kong will use this clarity to build systems where close enough is never good enough when lives are at stake, or whether the investigation and arrests will themselves be close enough to justice, close enough to reform, close enough to prevent the next tragedy.
One hundred and sixty people died because foam boards were close enough to fire-resistant material, because a contractor with a poor record was close enough to a safe one, because inspections were close enough to enforcement, because complaints were close enough to action. Their deaths demand more than metaphors, however apt. They demand precision, accountability, and the kind of systematic reform that recognizes the difference between appearing to address a problem and actually solving it.
In Hu Shih’s parable, Mr. Chabuduo’s final words are that living and death are “chabuduo”—close enough, more or less the same. Hong Kong now faces a choice: accept this grim equivalence or insist that the distance between safety and catastrophe, between governance and its performance, between 160 people alive and 160 people dead, is not “close enough” at all. It is the distance that matters most.