At least 40 people have been killed in a scaffolding collapse at a building site in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangxi.
A work platform at a power plant cooling tower being built in the city of Fengcheng came tumbling down around 7am on Thursday morning (10am AEDT), an official with the Work Safety Administration said.
He put the confirmed death toll at 22 but the official Xinhua News Agency said that figure had risen to at least 40 by midday (local time).
Xinhua said an unknown number of others were still trapped in the debris.
Television footage and photographs from the site showed iron pipes and wooden planks strewn across the floor of the massive concrete cooling tower.
China has suffered a series of major industrial accidents over recent months blamed on corruption, disregard for safety and pressure to boost production amid a slowing economy.
The head of a logistics company was recently handed a suspended death sentence over a massive explosion at an illegal chemical warehouse in the northern port of Tianjin in 2015 that killed 173 people, most of them firefighters and police officers.
In June 2015, poor decisions by the captain and crew were blamed for the deaths of 442 people after a modified cruise ship capsized on the Yangtze River.
Eighty-one people were killed in December when a man-made mountain of soil and waste collapsed on nearly three-dozen buildings in the southern manufacturing centre of Shenzhen.
AP
