Burning question of the day: Should the Great Wall of China earn a spot on a new list of the Seven Wonders of the World?

Actually it’s not a burning question. It’s a stupid question.

But it is a query that is getting a lot of airtime on state television and in the newspapers and websites of China.

You may have heard that a Swiss-based foundation (www.new7wonders.com) is sponsoring a global contest to name the new seven wonders. Among the landmarks vying are Rome's Colosseum, Jordan's ancient city of Petra, the Great Wall, the Acropolis in Athens, Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin and the Sydney Opera House.

Among the original seven wonders named by Greek historian Herotodus are the Pyramids of Egypt, again in contention for the new list. Original wonders like the hanging gardens of Babylon, the statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Colossus of Rhodes have vanished.

Egypt is in a dither that the Pyramids would be part of any such contest, saying they don’t need to be put to a vote to be included.

Now China is up in arms, partly because a group this week called a press conference to stoke up anxiety that the Great Wall wouldn’t make the cut. The news was all over the state-run media, and Chinese were urged en masse to vote by text message from their mobile phones. (You can also vote on the internet at the website above but most Chinese can't read the English website.)

Well it turns out that the Great Wall Association of China that stirred up the issue is associated with a for-profit company, Changsha Yunbo, that set up the voting so it would cost about 13 cents for each mobile phone vote cast in China.

Sweet, huh? Stir up some nationalism, then profit from it.

It gets sweeter. You can vote for the seven wonders as many times as you like, and the Great Wall Association of China and Changsha Yunbo would like nothing better than for you to keep dialing that cell phone. Ka-ching!

The new list of the Seven Modern Wonders will be announced July 7th in Lisbon, a day after worldwide voting ends.

Does anybody think this contest is anything but moronic? Would any of China’s 1.3 billion citizens NOT vote for the Great Wall? Certainly Egypt, which has 80 million people, saw how the numbers might add up.