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China frets about Great Wall's "wonder" status
2007-05-30
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, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday. 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 Web site has been translated into Chinese, Xinhua added. "China's Great Wall missed an opportunity 2,000 years ago when the Greeks named the Seven Wonders of the World. It would be extremely regretful if it became an also-ran this time," the academy said in a statement. 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.
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