Why is Christ the Redeemer one of the 7 New Wonders of the World?

The Great Wall of China, the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico, the Colosseum in Rome, India's Taj Mahal and... the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro.

About 90 million people from across the globe joined in what was essentially a huge publicity stunt, a few weeks ago: voting via the Internet to choose a new list of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The lucky seven represented a collection of mystical, centuries-old
places and more modern constructions of limited transcendence - though chosen
in a decidedly unscientific poll.

Six from the traditional 7 Wonders - the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the
Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of
Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse of
Alexandria - have vanished. The pyramids of Giza, of which The Great
Pyramid of Khufu is the only surviving structure from the original
seven wonders of the ancient world, were assured of honorary status in
addition to the new seven after Egyptian government declared it was a
disgrace they even had to compete.

The campaign was launched in 1999 by the flashy Swiss entrepreneur Bernard Weber.

Almost 200 nominations came in, then the list was narrowed to 21, after a preliminary vote last year.

Amazingly, the Christ beat out landmarks like:

Cambodia's Angkor,
Spain's Alhambra,
Turkey's Hagia Sophia,
Japan's Kiyomizu Temple,
Russia's Kremlin,
St. Basil's Cathedral,
Britain's Stonehenge,
Germany's Neuschwanstein Castle,
Mali's Timbuktu,
Eiffel Tower in Paris,
Easter Island in the Pacific,
the Statue of Liberty in New York City,
the Akropolis in Athens
and Australia's Sydney Opera House...

The question is why is the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro any "wonder"? The structure is a mere 38-meter tall statue without any artistic or architectonic value. Engineer Heitor da Silva Costa and Polish-French monument sculptor Pavol Landowski created the final
version, made out of reinforced concrete. The outer layers of the statue are soapstone. Nothing really special...

The Rio de Janeiro statue won, though, for a tricky reason: starting 3
months before the final voting, every newspaper, radio station and TV
channel in Brazil pumped up a campaign for votes. Brazilians just simply
wanted to home one of the 7 Wonders... Every time I opened a Brazilian
media site, a banner or a pop-up would try to convince me to go vote for the "Cristo Redentor", or "Corcovado", as we call him. The Catholic Church used Sunday mass
to plead for votes. There was even a countdown on television to let
people know the time was running out to add more votes to the Christ
statue. And, considering we are 190 million people and the fourth country in the world in number of personal computers, immediatelly after the U.S., China and Japan, it was not a difficult task...

The truth behind the new 7 Wonders of the World is that most of the
winning monuments come from very populous countries (China, India,
Brazil, Mexico), thus with an advantage point in voting power.