A survey shows that 97 percent of North Korean defectors in China have no intention to return to their poverty-stricken homeland, even if they still have family there.

Some ten percent of the respondents had been held in political prison camps, while 40 percent were unaware of the international community’s ten-year aid program to the North.

The survey results were published in a report by a U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea research team led by South Korean professor Chang Yoon-ok. The private organization conducted the survey of 13-hundred North Korean defectors in nine Chinese border areas near North Korea such as Shenyang between August 2004 and September 2005.

The report claims that the unwillingness of North Korean defectors to return to the communist country supports granting them refugee status.