41 missing after China landslide

More than 400 rescuers were mobilised to search for 41 people missing after a landslide engulfed workers at a construction site in southeastern China early yesterday, state media reported.

Rocks and mud with a volume of 100,000 cubic meters buried an office building and the workers' living area at the site in mountainous Taining county in Fujian province around 5:00 am, according to a website run by the county's Communist Party's publicity department.

Xinhua earlier said 34 were missing, and reported President Xi Jinping had urged "maximum efforts" to find survivors, reports AFP.  A Taining county official, who only gave his surname of Wei, said firefighters and police were attempting to reach the buried, who were working on a hydropower project.

An official at the department said by phone that the cause of the landslide was still unclear, but that the area had seen rainfall in the past few days.

Heavy rain has affected much of southern China since Wednesday, triggering floods and landslides, reports AP.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported that a 75-year-old woman and her 3-year-old great-grandson were washed away in an overflowing river from Friday to Saturday in Hubei province.

Rainstorms had earlier led to the evacuation of more than 1,000 people in Guangxi region, and collapsed a road in Guizhou province that left one person dead and one missing.

A landslide in the southern commercial hub of Shenzhen in December, caused by the improper storage of waste, killed at least 58 people, with some 25 still unaccounted for.