A worried neighbour filmed the moment a little boy living in the building across from him tried to climb over the 80-ft-tall balcony to grab his toy tricycle.
The man – not named in local media in Guangxi, southern China – was horrified to find the child roaming freely around the sixth-floor open balcony.
Phone footage – shared later on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok – shows the nail-biting moment the boy – who appears to be five or six years old – hopping onto the guardrail in his slippers and underwear to reach the trike that had been left on a ledge made for an air conditioning unit. It had apparently been put there to make space on the balcony.
As the kid dangles his left leg over the railing, the camera turns downwards to show the mouth-dropping height he is loosely hanging over.
But the boy seems to be only interested in getting to his blue-coloured toy trike on the outer ledge while disregarding the danger.
As he leans further out, the neighbour yells at the boy to get down, which apparently startles the child and makes him realise he is doing something wrong.
He quickly gets off the guardrail and sits on another toy with his back turned, seemingly trying to feign innocence and get out of trouble.
Fortunately, the man’s timely reaction prevented a potential tragedy.
Local authorities later alerted the child’s parents to the incident, and they quickly removed all the items from the ledge outside the balcony and thanked the neighbour for helping their son.
Numerous netizens criticised the parents for recklessly leaving the child unsupervised on an open balcony.
Douyin user ‘Ah Yan’ said in a comment: “What are the parents of this child going to do? They’re not being responsible at all! I’m really speechless! It will be too late for regrets after he falls!”
Another user titled ‘North nose of painting’ said: “I hope you show this video to his parents so that this kind of thing does not happen again.”
