Eight primary school students have drowned in a river in southwestern China after one child fell in the water and others jumped in to try to save them, Chinese state media has said.

The children had gone to play at a beach on the Fu River on Sunday afternoon, state broadcaster CCTV reported, and their bodies were recovered by authorities on Monday morning.

They came from Mixin, a town near Sichuan province on the outskirts of the sprawling megacity of Chongqing, and were reported to have been students of a local primary school.

Although it was unclear how the first child fell into the river, state media said the rest of the students drowned after attempting to save them from the water.

Heavy rain had been forecast for the area, but it was not clear if the weather was a factor in the incident.

No further details on the deaths were immediately available.

Drowning was found to be the leading cause of injury death in China for children aged 1–14 years, according to the World Health Organisation’s 2014 Global Report on Drowning.

In total, about 57,000 people drown each year - more than 150 a day - across the country, according to figures attributed to the Chinese Health Ministry in 2016.

A 2018 article in the Chinese newspaper Global Times blamed “the dire lack of swimming education” in the country for the high number of drowning deaths and recommended making swimming a compulsory skill for all Chinese school children.

“Community-based, supervised swim lessons for school-age children in Western countries is why those nations have very low drowning rates,” the paper said.

Additional reporting by AP