Restaurant in China collapses during birthday party, killing 29

Rescue efforts ended at a two-storey restaurant in a northern Chinese city after the building collapsed during an 80th birthday celebration, killing 29 people.

On Sunday, the Ministry of Emergency Management said another 28 people were injured, seven of them seriously, when the building crumbled on Saturday.

The ministry said 57 people were brought out alive.

There was no immediate comment about the fate of the birthday party guests or what caused the collapse.

Hundreds of rescue workers using sniffer dogs, cranes and high-tech sensors searched the rubble, lifting slabs of concrete in the hope of freeing survivors.

The China Daily reported that the building collapsed at 9.40am on Saturday. It said the Cabinet's Work Safety Commission would oversee the investigation into the cause of the accident.

While China has made major improvements to industrial safety, building standards are sometimes ignored, particularly in rural areas such as Shanxi province's Xiangfen county, about 750 kilometres south-west of Beijing, where the restaurant stood.

The region is in the heart of China's coal country, where thousands of miners have died in explosions, collapses and floods in the past.