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A series of earthquakes has struck China, with a magnitude 6.9 quake killing at least 300 people and injuring another 8000 in Qinghai province, on the mountainous Tibetan plateau.
A series of quakes and aftershocks caused low, brick buildings in Qinghai province's Yushu region to collapse, residents and state media said. Troops have been dispatched to the area.
"Certainly there have been people hurt. Rescuers are trying to pull them out," resident Talen Tashi told Reuters.
"A lot of one-storey houses have collapsed. Taller buildings have held up, but there are big cracks in them."

People from the Yushu prefecture highway department were frantically trying to dig out colleagues trapped in a collapsed building, department official Ji Guodong said by telephone.
Most of the low residential buildings had fallen, Huang Limin, a government official in Yushu told state television.
"Casualties are unclear. Maybe dozens were injured, maybe more. It's hard to say," said Zhuo De, an ethnic Tibetan resident of Yushu, who spoke by phone from the capital of Qinghai province after contacting his family in Yushu.
"The homes are built with thick walls and are strong, but if they collapsed they could hurt many people inside."
The quake was centred in the mountains that divide Qinghai province from the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The foothills to the south and east of the area are home to herders and Tibetan monasteries of Yushu county, known for its horse festival, while the area to the north and west is arid and desolate.
The quake was centred 240 km north northwest of Qamdo in Tibet and 375 km south southeast of the mining town of Golmud in Qinghai, and had a depth of 10 km, it said.
A magnitude 5.0 quake struck the same region late on Tuesday night, and aftershocks of magnitude-6 and over rattled the town Wednesday morning, sending fearful residents into the streets.
The Tibetan plateau is regularly shaken by earthquakes, but casualties are usually minimal because so few people live there. The exception was the magnitude-8 quake that hit the Sichuan foothills in May 2008, killing 80,000 people.

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