BEIJING - CHINA will require teachers to protect students from danger in future, after a teacher was the first to flee when a massive earthquake struck Sichuan last month, state media said yesterday.

'Protecting students' safety' has been added to new state ethics regulations for primary and secondary school teachers, the China Daily reported.

A draft of the revision was posted on the Education Ministry's website on Wednesday. It is soliciting public opinions until July30.

The draft did not specify what would happen if teachers broke the rule.

The change appears to be in response to a frenzied debate which began after Mr Fan Meizhong, a high school teacher in the south-western city of Dujiangyan, near the epicentre of the May12 earthquake in China, admitted online that he had abandoned his students.

He was teaching a literature class at the time and yelled 'Earthquake!' before fleeing the classroom, leaving his stunned students behind.

'In this fleeting moment of life and death, I could only consider sacrificing myself for my daughter,' Mr Fan wrote on tianya.cn, a social web portal, 10 days after the quake. 'I would not care about other people, even if it were my mother, under this type of circumstances.'

He has been fired and stripped of his teaching qualification, even though none of his students died in the magnitude-8 quake that has left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing.

The education authorities said Mr Fan, now nicknamed 'Running Fan', should not have left his students to fend for themselves, according to the China Daily.

'The cowardice and selfishness that the teacher displayed when his own and the students' lives were threatened is anything but a quality that a qualified teacher should possess,' the newspaper said in a commentary yesterday.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted the school's principal as saying that Mr Fan had been dismissed not for running out of the school but for the comments he made after that.

A spokesman for the Education Ministry was quoted as saying: 'We don't have to be noble, but we will not tolerate shamelessness.'

Mr Fan, who said he had been fired by the school due to enormous public pressure, has threatened to sue the authorities, arguing that chivalry was not part of his job description.

He was quoted in yesterday's South China Morning Post as saying that he was a distinguished teacher, and although he may not be morally inspiring, 'neither am I shameless'.

He added that his critics were only seeking to make themselves feel morally superior.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS, REUTERS