BEIJING — A secondary school teacher has admitted abandoning his pupils to their fate when the Sichuan earthquake struck China last month.

Fan Meizhong set out on a Web log his guiding principle: in matters of life and death, it’s every man for himself.

When the quake struck, rather than overseeing an orderly evacuation, he said he just shouted “Stay calm, it’s an earthquake!” and ran for it without looking back to see if his pupils were following.

“When I reached the centre of the football pitch, I found I was the first to escape. None of my pupils was with me,” wrote the man now known across China as “Runner Fan.”

When his pupils began to arrive, they asked: “Teacher, why didn’t you bring us out?”

His explanation was simple. “I have a very strong sense of self-preservation,” he said. “I have never been a brave man and I’m only really concerned about myself.”

In the event, all his pupils survived.

While Chinese newspapers have largely followed instructions to concentrate on uplifting tales of rescue work since the earthquake, the Internet has seen a wild variety of tales emerge.

It was Internet sites that first reported the quake and where some of the first pictures of collapsed schools were posted. Internet users have debated how to apportion blame for shoddy building work, as well as rallying praise for emergency services and politicians seen to have done a good job.

Many news reports have focused on teachers putting children first, almost certainly representing the vast majority. One teacher, Tan Qianqiu, was found dead with his body shielding four of his pupils, all of them alive.

In an interview, Mr. Fan said: “I didn’t cause the earthquake, so I have no reason to feel guilty.”

He also risked angering those closer to him, saying he would not have tried to save his own mother if she had been present, though he might have made an exception to his general rule for his 1-year-old daughter.

He pointed out that education law does not demand that a teacher save his pupils during an earthquake. “If every teacher was like Mr. Tan, then we’d have no more heroes,” he said.

The head of the private school where Mr. Fan worked is under pressure to fire him, and publicly questioned Mr. Fan’s wisdom in being so frank. Running might be a normal reaction, he said, but talking about it afterward was something else entirely.

One commentator in a state newspaper, the Shanghai Daily, described Mr. Fan as a “courageous coward” for admitting what happened — but added that his courage was not sufficient to exonerate his cowardice.