The explosion Tuesday night in Shadi, a town in the coastal province of Fujian, knocked down houses up to 200 feet away and injured more than 30 people, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The explosives had been moved from a factory to a private house on an eel farm to evade a safety crackdown launched in the county after a blast July 31 at another factory, Xinhua said. The earlier explosion killed five people.
Despite repeated government safety crackdowns, explosions and fires cause hundreds of deaths annually in China's fireworks industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of people. Many are in poor rural areas and work at home or in rudimentary factories.
Following the July 31 explosion, authorities ordered unspecified steps to ``strengthen the management'' of fireworks factories in the county, Xinhua said.
But it said several producers moved fireworks out of factories in the area to evade inspections.
Xinhua said a ``large number of fireworks'' were stored at the house that exploded on Tuesday but it did not say how many. The report didn't give a cause for the blast or say whether anyone connected with trying to hide the fireworks had been detained.
