In recent years, a large number of incidents of external fire spread up high rise buildings happened in the world. One of main reasons is that combustible organic materials, EPS, Polyurethane, etc, are used in external thermal insulation system (ETIS) for energy conservation purpose. In some incidents, fire spread in combustible organic materials couple with that from window to window make it impossible for fire fighters to prevent the external vertical fire spread up high rise buildings and caused severe damage to structures and loss of life and property. In this paper, some typical external wall fire hazards in China are described briefly, and then relative research progresses are presented. Furthermore, some research needs and possible directions of future research are proposed.