Special fire behaviors and problems of fire safety engineering for high-rise buildings is a crucial topic attracting more and more attentions due to the serious fire disasters in recent years especially in China and Far East. A new National Key Basic Research Program of China (973 program) has been approved (five years, 2012-2016) by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China to meet this special fire safety demand with a funding of nearly 36 million RMB (5.7 million $). This program entitled “Fundamental Research on Fire Prevention and Control for City High-rise Buildings” is chaired by State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS), University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Prof. Jinhua Sun from SKLFS serves as the Principal Investigator of the research team which covers USTC, Tsinghua University, Tongji University, China Academy of Building Research, Anhui University of Architecture, and (TianJin, ShangHai, SiChuan, ShenYang) Fire Research Institute of Ministry of Public Security of China. The research focus will cover both fundamental and engineering aspects of high-rise building fire safety, including combustion behaviour and safety design of facade thermal insulation material, high-rise building facade fire spread and control, safety of building structure components in fire, smoke transportation and control, as well as efficient evacuation strategy design. It is expected that this program will help promote the innovations in both the fundamental researches of fire dynamics and the applied researches for new fire technologies and codes, directly toward fire safety of high-rise buildings. During the International FORUM of Fire Research Directors Annual Meeting of 2012 (held in Hefei, October 13-16, 2012), a workshop on Fire safety of high rise building was organized by SKLFS, in which new progress of this program was systematically reported and the current research demand was extensively discussed with FORUM members and other international scholars.