A car rammed into a gate at the US consulate in Shanghai on Thursday evening, injuring an armed police guard, Chinese state media reported.

A car rammed into a gate at the US consulate in Shanghai on Thursday evening, injuring an armed police guard, Chinese state media reported.

The driver, 35-year-old Liu Daojie from Sanming city in China's southeastern Fujian province, has been taken into police custody, official news agency Xinhua said, citing a Shanghai police statement.

The black Toyota sedan veered off the road and crashed into a guardrail at the side entrance of the consulate at 9:43 pm, before police and consulate guards managed to capture the driver, Xinhua said.

"A black car intended to rush into US General Consulate in Shanghai at 10 p.m. Thursday. The male driver has been controlled", a tweet from the state-run People's Daily newspaper said.

Images posted on social media showed the car, which appeared to have mounted the pavement and crashed into a barricade next to a sentry box at the US consulate in the city's central Xuhui district.

The driver told police he ran a large company in Fujian province and felt someone wanted to kill him, and so caused the incident as a way to get people's attention, Xinhua said.

"I drove from Hangzhou to Shanghai today, and saw the place is guarded by armed police. So I crashed my car into it," the police statement quoted Liu as saying, adding that he appeared to be confused and spoke incoherently.

Police have preliminarily excluded drunk or drug driving as a cause of the crash, Xinhua said, after earlier media reports cited police as saying the driver was drunk. An investigation is underway.