Houston Community News >> China Sweats on Great Wall 7 Wonders Hopes
5/29/2007 CHINA is so worried
that its iconic Great Wall will not be named one of the "new" Seven Wonders of
the World it has launched a campaign to get Chinese people to vote for it.
More than 45 million votes had so far been cast in an online campaign by the
non-profit New7Wonders Foundation (www.new7wonders.com) to choose the world's
seven “new” wonders, the foundation said.
The final result will be unveiled on July 7.
According to the Academy of the Great Wall of China, the wall has recently
dropped out of the top seven and it blamed the voting process, saying relatively
few Chinese used the Internet and those that did had poor English-language
abilities.
But people can now vote by mobile telephone, and some of the website has been
translated into Chinese, Xinhua added.
“China's Great Wall missed an opportunity 2000 years ago when the Greeks named
the Seven Wonders of the World,” the academy said.
"It would be extremely regretful if it became an also-ran this time."
Among other monuments or sites nominated were the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Taj
Mahal in India, Peru's mountaintop city of Machu Picchu, Britain's Stonehenge
and New York's Statue of Liberty.
The New7Wonders Foundation was set up in 2001 by Swiss-Canadian adventurer
Bernard Weber to protect humanity's heritage.
The ancient Greeks chose the original Seven Wonders but only one of those
remains - the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt
(Contributed by Reuters)