State news agency Xinhua said 68 of the 74 dead have been identified so far, with victims ranging in age from 23 to 53.
The accident happened on Thursday morning in Fengcheng, in Jiangxi province, during work on a cooling tower for the coal-fired power plant.
The official China Daily newspaper said the accident happened when a tower crane collapsed, triggering the collapse of the entire construction platform as the night shift was being relieved by the morning shift.
"We will conduct a serious investigation into the cause of the accident and hold those who are responsible accountable," Jiangxi vice governor Li Yihuang was quoted as saying.
The company in charge of the plant, Jiangxi Ganneng Co, said in a stock exchange filing on Thursday it was cooperating with authorities.
The China Daily cited a company statement from September as saying it had started a 100-day campaign to speed up construction of the plant and take advantage of days with "fine weather".
Yang Huanning, head of the State Administration of Work Safety, had already arrived on the scene to oversee an investigation into what happened and to collect evidence, the People`s Daily said.
His administration held an emergency meeting with departments all over China to learn the lessons of the accident to root out "hidden dangers" and ensure people`s safety, the newspaper said.
China has vowed to improve its poor safety record.
President Xi Jinping has said authorities would learn the lessons paid for with blood after chemical blasts in the port city of Tianjin killed more than 170 people last year.
Shortly after those explosions, Yang Dongliang was removed from his post as director of the State Administration of Work Safety and later charged with corruption.
He admitted during his trial on Thursday taking bribes and gifts worth 28.5 million yuan ($4.1 million). He will be sentenced at a later date.
The two Yangs are not related.
24/11/2016
13:57
State media say the death toll from the collapse of scaffolding at a construction site in eastern China has jumped to 67, with two other workers injured and one more missing.
China`s state broadcaster CCTV says more than 100 paramilitary police have joined in efforts to rescue workers trapped when a work platform at a power plant construction site came tumbling down Thursday morning.
The plant`s cooling tower was being built in the city of Fengcheng in Jiangxi province.
The latest reported death toll suggests that nearly all the construction workers at the cooling tower perished. Local media reports say close to 70 people were working at the site when the scaffolding collapsed.
Footage showed iron pipes, steel bars and wooden planks strewn across the floor of the cooling tower.
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09:09
The death toll from the collapse of a cooling tower at an electric power plant construction site in China`s Jiangxi province has reached 40, Xinhua news agency reported.
The collapse occurred in the city of Fengcheng, in the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi at around 7 a. m. local time on Thursday (23:00 GMT on Wednesday), the Fengcheng safety supervision bureau said.
