At least 35 people were killed and 42 were injured in a stampede during a New Year's celebration on the Bund, the famed waterfront tourist area in central Shanghai, official Chinese media reported.
Government television CCTV America quoted online media company Sina News as saying that large crowds in Chen Yi Square on the Bund led to the stampede.
It said authorities were working to rescue and aid the wounded.
The official Xinhua news service reported that the stampede began at 11.35pm, but it was not immediately clear what triggered it.
Photographs posted online showed densely packed crowds of revelers along the Bund, one of the most famed tourist areas in Shanghai that runs along the bank of the Huangpu River.
In some photographs, rescue workers were seen trying to resuscitate victims lying on the pavement while ambulances waited nearby.
Authorities had cancelled an annual 3D laser show on the Bund that last year attracted as many as 300,000 people.
#Video aftermath #Shanghai stampede. @YahooNews @Reuters @DRUDGE @NBCNews @WNews_Reddit http://t.co/4C2GefzEqP pic.twitter.com/ILANiTPxhc
— CCTV America (@CCTV_America) December 31, 2014The injured have been taken to at least three local hospitals, the Shanghai government said.
Most large gatherings in China are carefully controlled by authorities but the country has seen other incidents in which overcrowding has caused panic and deaths.
Last year, 14 people - some of them children - were killed and ten injured in a stampede that broke out as food was being distributed at a mosque in China's Ningxia region.
Also last year, six students were killed in a stampede at a primary school in Kunming city in the southwest after the accidental blocking of a stairway corridor.
