About 60,000 people drown in China every year, not including those who die in floods or boat and ferry accidents, according to government statistics. USA TODAY


BEIJING — Wednesday is beginners’ night at the Shenshi Yangguang swimming club in downtown Beijing. Twenty students, mostly young women, cling to the edge of the pool, gingerly lowering their faces into the water. They cough and sputter.They have never been in water this deep before, and they are nervous.

“It wasn’t possible to learn to swim when I was young. It took me all summer to build up the courage to come to this class,” explained Feng Sihan, 24, a cosmetics saleswoman.

To the outside world, China looks like a swimming powerhouse, winning 18 medals at the Rio Olympics this summer for aquatic events.

The reality is quite different: Few Chinese know how to swim, and drownings are tragically common as a result.

As China makes huge strides in other areas of public health and safety, the impact of this problem is emerging. Drowning is now the No. 1 killer of children under the age of 14, topping traffic accidents and infectious disease.

“Clearly that tells us that the burden of drowning is too heavy,” said Bernhard Schwartländer, the World Health Organization representative in China.

About 60,000 people drown in China every year, not including those who die in floods or boat and ferry accidents, according to government statistics. That’s double the number in India, which has nearly the same population, and 15 times as many as in the United States, whose population is one-fourth the size of China's.

Up to 70% of the victims are children, said Wang Bin, a professor of physical education at Central China Normal University.

While he and others concede that learning to swim does not guarantee a person won't drown, it does dramatically reduce the chances of dying in the water.

“Everyone should learn to swim,” Wang said. “We need to make Chinese people understand it is a basic life skill.”

Until a generation ago, China was a very poor country, so swimming pools and lessons were a rarity. Some people taught themselves to swim in rivers and lakes, of course, but most simply avoided water to be safe.

Those who could swim, like China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, were considered especially brave and strong. Many posters from the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 show a 72-year-old Mao in his bathrobe after he swam across the Yangzte River.

Despite those revolutionary credentials, swimming didn’t become a sport of the masses then — or now.

Figures are hard to come by, but one recent survey from the island of Hainan — China’s Hawaii — found that just 21% of teenagers could hold their own in the water.

Another report from the rural part of central Hebei province said only 10% of the children could swim, blaming poor access to pools and affordable classes.

Parents — who often can’t swim — can be wary about having their children learn to swim, fearing that will make the youngsters too bold around the water. Later, when children are teenagers, parents worry that learning to swim will take time away from a heavy academic schedule.

So it is common for those Chinese who do know how to swim to end up learning while in their 20s.

“I didn’t learn when I was small because my parents were scared I would drown. I am learning now because I want to go diving in the Philippines,” said architect Wang Hui, 26, who is in the same swimming class as Feng.

Yet to really reduce the number of drownings, experts said swimming lessons need to reach those most at risk — poor children who live in the countryside.

Like all Chinese children, they receive theoretical safety classes at school that stress the need to swim only in supervised pools. But most of them don't live near one, so they gravitate to nearby rivers and lakes during China’s long, hot summers.

One such child was Xia Wenjun, a lively 13-year-old from a rice-growing village in China’s eastern Anhui province. On Aug. 28, she and a friend went to play on the bank of a nearby lake where the government had built a beach volleyball court to attract tourists.

They fell in and never came home.

“The water wasn’t deep. If she had been able to swim, she would have survived,” said her grandfather, Xia Yuefan, 79. “It would be better if the government could do more.”

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