• She rescued a child from a frozen lake
• She crawled across the ice despite it cracking

The bravery of a 13-year-old Chinese girl impressed everyone after she risked her life to rescue a four-year-old child who had fallen into a frozen lake in the Ningxia region, northwest China.

The child was playing on the surface of the lake when his foot suddenly slipped and he fell into a hole in the ice.

While his terrified mother waited for rescue teams on the shore, the girl stepped forward and offered to help, saying: “I’m light in weight, let me go down to rescue him.”

The girl used a tube provided by some residents and crawled across the surface of the ice, but she also partially sank when part of the lake cracked.

Fortunately, rescue teams arrived quickly and pulled both the child and the girl out of the freezing water, and provided her with a blanket to warm her after she was exposed to temperatures as low as five degrees Celsius below zero.

The girl was later identified as Li Jia Ting, a student at Tongxin No. 2 Middle School.

Her father explained that his daughter sat beside the heater after returning home to dry her wet clothes, and hid the incident from him when he asked, saying that she had only gone near a water-spraying truck.

Her father expressed his pride and sense of relief after learning of his daughter’s bravery, but admitted that his heart ached to see her risk her life.

He said: “I am proud of my daughter. Despite the freezing water and the fragile ice, she did not hesitate to save a human life.”