BEIJING, Jan. 25(Xinhuanet)-- Chinese Minister of Culture Sun Jiazheng and French Minister for Culture and Communications Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres issued a joint statement here Tuesday, showingtheir expectation for the international convention on protecting diversified cultures.

The convention is being drafted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific a nd Cultural Organization(UNESCO).

In the past decade, technology explosion and fast globalizationhave posed an unprecedented threat to cultural diversity worldwide.On June 1998, cultural ministers from over 20 countries met in Ottawa of Canada. They decided to build the International Network on Cultural Policy and hold a ministerial meeting every year to discuss how to maintain cultural diversity in a fast-globalized world.

On the fifth ministerial meeting held in South Africa in 2003, ministers recognized the necessity of an international convention on the protection of diversified cultures and agreed to bring it into the framework of the UNESCO, who passed a declaration on world cultural diversity on Nov. 2, 2001.

At the seventh annual ministerial meeting held in Shanghai last October, Chinese and French culture ministers exchanged views on the convention being drafting by the UNESCO.