28 killed in shoe factory fire in China's Fujian province

Twenty-eight people were killed after fire ripped through Huiteng Shoes Co. Ltd. in Jiangtou Village, Chendai Town, in Jinjiang City, Fujian Province, as rescue crews kept working into the evening and smoke still poured from the site. The blaze hit a shoe factory in one of China’s most important footwear manufacturing centers, turning a local industrial accident into a national emergency.

Local fire authorities said the Quanzhou Fire Rescue Command Center received the alarm at 12:04 p.m. on July 9, 2026, and sent teams immediately. By about 6:30 p.m., the scene was still shrouded in thick black smoke, with multiple fire trucks spraying water and more than 20 ambulances standing by as crews pressed to reach anyone still trapped inside.

China’s Ministry of Emergency Management and the National Fire and Rescue Administration sent a joint working group to Jinjiang to direct rescue and response efforts. President Xi Jinping said the blaze had caused “heavy human losses” and ordered full-scale rescue and investigative efforts, including support for victims’ families.

The fire struck in Jinjiang, a major footwear manufacturing hub in southeastern China, where factories like Huiteng Shoes Co. Ltd. anchor a large local labor force and feed global supply chains. That makes the scale of the death toll especially sharp for a city whose economy depends heavily on factory production and the safety standards that are supposed to govern it.

The immediate response now places pressure on both local and central authorities to explain how such a fast-moving fire could claim so many lives inside a workplace. As rescue operations continued, the priority in Jinjiang remained clear: account for the missing, determine how the fire spread, and establish whether the factory met the safety rules meant to protect the workers inside.