Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project in Beijing

During June this year a group of NWIP students and doctor from Sweden and France visited IPPNW affiliates in three countries in North East Asia to meet students within health proffessions, discuss and enhance the cooperation between our affiliates and promote the Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project.

12-16^th of June: Visiting Korean Anti-Nuclear Peace Physicians (KANPP) in Pyongyang, DPRK.

17-19^th of June: Visiting students from Chinese Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (CPPNW) in Beijing, China.

20-23^rd of June: Attending the IPPNW North East Asian Regional Meeting in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. 

The following delegates attended this delegation:

Anne-Lorraine Bouquiaux – student representative of IPPNW France (China and Mongolia)

Johannes Norberg – student representative of IPPNW Sweden (SLMK)

Thomas Silfverberg – student representative of the SLMK Election Committee

Martin Tondel – Vice Chairman of SLMK

Wenjing Tao – Coordinator of NWIP

NEW FUEL TO CPPNW?

Between the 17-19^th of June, NWIP visited Beijing for a short meeting with the Chinese students which NWIP established contacts with during the last World Congress in Helsinki 2006. During these few days we met Chinese students at the Medical Faculty of Beijing University and discussed the Nuclear Weapon situation in China and how IPPNW can support the Chinese affiliate.

Chinese Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (CPPNW) was started in 1993 and is approved by the State Council and Ministry of Health of China. The activity of CPPNW reached its high after the World Congress in Beijing 2004, where many students joined the organisation. Today it has 60 registered student members at three universities in Beijing, but currently no active doctor member. The main initiatives today comes from a core group of five to six students, of which most of them attended the World Congress in Helsinki.

Around twenty students from primarily the biomedical and nursing program attended our three-hour open meeting at Beijing University on the 18^th.  During this meeting students from the core group addressed some of the challenges that CPPNW face in trying to increase its memberships and activities. Amongst others, they mentioned the lack of physicians as an important issue. Seminars about the organization that has been previously done on hospitals in Beijing have given no bigger success. Secondly, they also mentioned the political system and the lack of support from the government as an obstacle, and thirdly the lack of funding. We presented the IPPNW student movement and discussed around nuclear weapons issues and the current status of the Chinese nuclear weapons. We ended with the Activism workshop where the students gathered in groups and discussed possible future CPPNW activities. The students were very lively in their discussions and came up with idea such as writing articles to the school newspaper, arranging seminars and dialogues at their universities, arranging poster competitions etc. Some of the students were interested of doing activities not directly related to nuclear weapons, such as inform about HIV/Aids out in the countryside and saving-water-campaigns. As IPPNW student movement as a whole does activities in a variety of fields, we did not object to the latter ideas.  

Between the core group and NWIP we discussed how IPPNW could support the affiliate. The students believe the first step is to increase their core group members and try to spread to other cities in China before adressing the doctors (perhaps starting with radiologists). Financial support for activities was a topic that came up. As we are aware of the financial situation of IPPNW, we could only promise to turn directly to affiliates that are more well off, providing that the students send us a budget plan for the coming year.

To summarise, it is difficult to point out what needs to be done in order revitalise CPPNW and attract more physicians. In the future, it might be possible for NWIP and other IPPNW students in North East Asia to send a delegation to other cities in China to spread the words of IPPNW and carry out dialogues with university students.