A teacher who fled a classroom leaving his students behind when a massive earthquake hit southwest China has been stripped of his teaching qualification and fired, a former colleague said Monday.

Fan Meizhong, a teacher at Guangya school in Dujiangyan, near the epicentre of the quake, admitted online to abandoning his students, earning him the nickname "Running Fan" amid increasingly strident calls for his dismissal.

"Mr. Fan was deprived of his teaching qualification from the local education bureau, so the school had to fire him," a teacher at Guangya school who gave her name as Ding told AFP on Monday.

She said Fan was sacked about two days ago.

At a time when China had been busy portraying the heroic actions of ordinary people in the 8.0-magnitude quake that hit Sichuan province, Fan became the subject of a frenzied media debate on his actions.

None of Fan's students died and the focus of the debate was not so much his spur-of-the-moment escape but an online post he wrote 10 days later, detailing what he had told his disappointed students following his dash for the door.

"In this fleeting moment of life and death, I could only consider sacrificing myself for my daughter, I would not care about other people, even if it were my mother, under this type of circumstance," Fan wrote on tianya.cn, a social web portal.

Chinese netizens castigated him for the comments, calling for his dismissal, although some rushed to his defence saying he had done what a lot of others probably did too, but had the courage to admit it.

But those lone voices were lost in the chorus of online condemnation that quickly spread to television, with a chat show on Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV opposing Fan to angry teachers and audience members two weekends ago.

A song was even composed about "Running Fan" and broadcast on the television channel to a background mix of a cartoon of the teacher running away and real-life shots of Fan.

The earthquake in Sichuan on May 12 left about 70,000 people dead or missing, including thousands of children after their school buildings collapsed on them.