BEIJING - Acupuncture has been selected as a candidate for Unesco intangible cultural heritage status.
'That's significant, particularly for acupuncture, which is widely practiced in more than 160 countries and regions worldwide,' said Huang Jianyin, deputy secretary-general with the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, a non-governmental organisation based in Beijing.
"Landing the status would help improve and secure the notion across the world that acupuncture and other traditional Chinese medical procedures were created in China by the Chinese," he told China Daily on Thursday.
Internationally, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture in particular, has been officially recognized and is widely practiced in countries like Japan, the United States, Germany and Republic of Korea (ROK), experts said.
Countries like ROK, Japan and France used to claim they were the cradle of acupuncture, according to Huang.
Li Zhigang, deputy director of the acupuncture school of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, told China Daily that ROK had tried to file an application for acupuncture to UNESCO.
"If they had made it before China and succeeded, people in other parts of the world might think it was South Korea that created acupuncture," he said.
Currently, China has about 600,000 licensed doctors in traditional Chinese medicine and almost all are trained in acupuncture, official statistics show.
In Beijing, a single session of acupuncture therapy costs 4 yuan ($0.59), a price set 20 years ago.
"That hurts the enthusiasm of practitioners and many acupuncture students at my school change occupation after graduation," Li said.
The final results will be announced around Nov 19.
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