A man from eastern China has been honoured as a national hero after he caught a falling toddler who had tumbled out of the window of her fifth-floor flat, landed on a first-floor terrace, and then slid over that edge and plummeted towards the pavement. Shen Dong, 31, was parking his car across the street on Tuesday when he heard a loud bang caused by the two-year-old girl landing on the steel roofing on the first-floor terrace of a housing complex after falling four stories out the window. The little girl then fell over the edge of the terrace when she started to move and fell towards the pavement , but Shen caught the little girl before she landed on the concrete, according to a viral video released by local police on Wednesday. The girl from Tongxiang in Zhejiang province injured her legs and lungs, but she is in stable condition. Shen, who works at a nearby bank, called emergency personnel while he was rushing with a female colleague to help the girl, but tossed his mobile phone immediately and reached the toddler just in time to prevent her from hitting the ground. He said he did not realise it was a child until she started moving a few seconds after landing on the terrace. The movement made her fall again, which is when Shen ran over to catch her. “To be honest, I cannot remember the details. I cannot remember if my arms hurt or anything. It was just instinct to reach out to her,” Shen told local newspaper Qianjiang Evening News . “It was lucky I made it in time. Otherwise, I would feel absolutely horrible,” he said. He said the child survived because the terrace she fell onto included steel roofing materials, which softened the fall. The video was widely shared and touched millions of web users after it was posted on the Weibo account of the police bureau of Jiaxing city, which oversees Tongxiang. “He is a superhero, stepping forward bravely at a critical moment. I hope he can get a mobile phone as a reward because the old one must have broken,” one user commented. In a similar case 11 years ago, a young mother named Wu Juping, also from Zhejiang province, won national applause for miraculously catching a toddler who fell from her 9th floor home while walking below the building. The girl survived, and Wu broke her arms. She was nicknamed China’s “most beautiful mother” for her heroism.