About 64 percent of respondents in a Chinese Internet poll said they would prefer to be born elsewhere if they could be reincarnated, copies of the survey results seen Monday revealed.

The poll which first appeared on Netease.com, one of China's major Internet portals, has reportedly led to the dismissal of two website editors, apparently due to the "negative" content of the survey.

Over 10,000 Chinese responded to the poll, with 37.5 percent saying they would not choose to be born Chinese because "being Chinese lacks human dignity," the poll results posted on overseas website www.kanzhongguo.com showed.

Another 17.6 percent of the respondents said they wouldn't want to be Chinese because "in China you can't buy a home and a happy life is unreachable," while the rest did not state a particular reason.

The responses were not all negative, as 1,877 respondents, making up 18.3 percent of those polled, said they would choose to be Chinese again because they "love their motherland."

According to the South China Morning Post, two senior editors of the popular Netease website were fired for apparently organizing the poll and choosing the questions asked to respondents.

A Netease editor in Beijing told AFP that one of the editors only recently left his job, but was unaware if it was linked to the poll.

"He does not work here any more … he left several days ago," the editor told AFP by phone.

"I know that survey, but it was put on the website a long time ago. Now it's deleted, I don't know why. I don't know if it has anything to do with (the missing editor)."

Human and media rights groups say China's leaders are tightening their crackdown on dissent in the media and intensifying control over the Internet and traditional press amid increasing social unrest.

Last month, China sentenced veteran Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong to five years in prison for spying on behalf of Taiwan.

Also last month, Zhao Yan, a Chinese researcher for the New York Times, was sentenced to three years in jail for fraud, after he was found not guilty of leaking state secrets.

Earlier this year in Beijing alone, local authorities revoked the licenses of six websites and temporarily shut down 12 others during a 90-day crackdown that ended in early June.

Source: Agence France-Presse