The conditions brought traffic to a standstill in eight provinces, cut off a key rail link and left thousands of vehicles marooned on icy highways, reports said, with the cold snap causing power cuts across more than half the country.

A bus that overturned on an icy freeway in eastern Jiangxi Province left five dead early Sunday, including at least two children, the official Xinhua news agency said, with sub-zero temperatures forecast for the next three days.

Heavy snow in south central China, meanwhile, snarled roads, railways and airports with the bad weather expected to worsen as millions of travellers head home for the Lunar New Year holiday, known elsewhere as Chinese New Year.

In the mountainous Guizhou Province in the southwest, a hospital in the capital city of Guiyang has received at least 1,500 patients in the last five days, most suffering fractures after falling on slippery roads.

The local government said bad weather had also stranded more than 40,000 passengers in at least 5,000 broken-down vehicles on highways between Guizhou and the neighboring Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

"We're trying to provide them with food and water, but several have passed out in the cold, including a new mother and her one-month-old baby," said Huang Zhengfu, secretary-general with the prefectural government.

Elsewhere, up to 150,000 passengers were stuck at the Guangzhou railway station, the southern end of the key rail link to the capital Beijing, with numbers expected to grow to up to 600,000 by Monday, the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported.

The large manufacturing and commercial city has issued emergency orders to help cope with the swelling crowds and called on local universities and other public facilities to provide shelter for stranded passengers, it said.

Lunar New Year, which falls on February 7, is China's most important holiday, when millions of people travel for annual family reunions.

China expects more than 2.2 billion trips will be made by either rail, air or bus during the Lunar New Year travel period that runs from January 19 to March 2.

According to Xinhua, up to 60,000 people in 20,000 vehicles were stranded on a stretch of highway in the central Hunan province, one of the worst hit areas where seven people have died.

Senior government officials held an emergency teleconference late Sunday to discuss the power disruptions, Xinhua said.

"So far, 17 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions have suffered blackouts, and power grids in central China's Hubei, Hunan provinces and south China's Guizhou and Guangdong provinces have been seriously damaged," Xinhua quoted Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan saying.

According to China Central Television, seven airports in the hardest hit regions, including those in the major cities of Changsha, Nanjing and Hefei were closed on Saturday due to icy conditions.

Some airports were expected to reopen soon, but the one in Changsha would remain shut throughout Sunday, reports said.

Major highways in Guizhou, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Fujian and Anhui provinces reopened by around noon Sunday, but were expected to be closed in the evening, with more heavy snow and freezing rain forecast throughout the region, the China News Service said.

Due to icy roads, long-distance bus travel was largely curtailed for much of the last week in the areas hardest hit by the snowfall.

State television showed footage of thousands of motorists and long-distance truck drivers stranded on stretches of road as heavy snow brought traffic to a standstill.

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