Rescuers carry a victim at the site of a collapsed bridge in Fenghuang, in central China's Hunan province, today. The 1,049-foot bridge, which was being built as a tourist attraction over the Jiantuo River, collapsed as workers were removing scaffolding Monday, killing at least 20 people.

Beijing ? A bridge under construction as a tourist attraction in central China collapsed Monday, killing at least 20 people and leaving 39 missing, state media reported.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 64 people were rescued, including 22 who were injured when the 1,050-foot bridge spanning the Jiantuo River in Hunan province suddenly gave way. The cause of the collapse was under investigation, it said.

The bridge in Hunan’s Fenghuang county had four decorative stone arches and was designed to be a tourist attraction, Xinhua said. It was scheduled to open at the end of August.

News photos showed the bridge reduced to a tangle of stone, concrete and steel reinforcement bars.

Rescuers were searching for victims and the accident was under investigation, Xinhua and a local official said.

“We have sent teams to the site for rescue efforts. … We have no idea about new updates because there is no mobile phone reception around that area,” said Liao Junhui, an official with the administrative office of the Fenghuang county government. “We cannot reach anyone with the team.”

Xinhua reported that most of the people working on the bridge were local farmers who had been recruited to work on the project.

On June 15, a bridge in south China’s Guangdong province collapsed when a cargo vessel loaded with sand rammed into it, killing nine people. That bridge was built in 1988 and spanned the Xijiang River, a major tributary of the Pearl River.

Construction accidents in China are frequent, with contractors often opting for shoddy materials to cut costs and using migrant laborers with little or no safety training.

The Ministry of Communications categorized 6,300 of the country’s bridges as dangerous because of serious damage to their “structural components” in its annual report on road safety last year, the China Daily newspaper reported today.

The report didn’t give specifics but quoted Xiao Rucheng, secretary general of China’s Institute of Bridge and Structural Engineering, as saying many of the country’s new bridges were being built too quickly and were poorly designed.

The Chinese bridge accident came nearly two weeks after the collapse Aug. 1 of a major interstate bridge in Minneapolis that killed nine people and left four others still missing. Authorities are trying to determine exactly what caused the nearly four-decade-old bridge to crumble.