BEIJING — A minibus collided with two trucks and a bus tumbled into a mountain gorge in two unrelated crashes today, killing a total of 37 people, police and a state news agency reported.

Twenty people were killed and 11 were injured when a bus broke through a highway barrier and crashed head-on with the trucks on the Hukun expressway, said a man from the eastern Jiangxi province Traffic Police Department. He would not give his name as is common in China.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the accident occurred in Fengcheng city, about 34 miles south of the provincial capital of Nanchang.

The injured were taken to a hospital, he said. No other details on the injured were available, he said.

Another bus tumbled into a mountain gorge on the Punan highway in Nanping city in southeastern Fujian province, Xinhua said, killing 17 and injuring eight. Rescue work is under way, it said.

Road accidents are common in China because of overloaded and unsafe vehicles, poor road conditions and bad driving habits.

Last week, 19 people were killed after a bus collided with a truck parked on the side of a busy highway in northeast China.