Beijing: The principal of a kindergarten in southern China has been sacked after welcoming students back to the first day of the new school year with pole dancing.

First the principal, and then a female adult dancer clad in black hot pants and heels, performed the raunchy routine gyrating around a flagpole bearing the Chinese national flag, in the school's assembly square as families and students watched on.

Smartphone video taken by stunned family members spread on Chinese social media. An American writer whose two young children attend the Xinshahui kindergarten in Shenzhen's Bao’an district expressed his shock on Twitter.

“So before our kids got out of kindergarten for the summer, there was 10 days of military 'activities' and displays of machine guns and mortars at the door; now the principal has welcomed them back with a strip pole dance on the flagpole bearing the PRC flag. She's gone nuts,” wrote Michael Standaert.