Secretary Norman Y. Mineta is a person of many firsts. He was the first Asian-American mayor of a major city, San Jose, California; the first Japanese American from the mainland to be elected to Congress; and the first Asian American to serve in a presidential cabinet. Mineta served as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce and President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Transportation. SPICE is honored to be collaborating with Mineta and Bridge Media, Inc., on making Mineta’s legacy more broadly known at the secondary and collegiate levels through the Mineta Legacy Project (MLP). The MLP will include a documentary and educational curriculum that are being developed with Mineta’s full involvement.

The documentary, titled An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy, “delves into Mineta’s life, public service career, and unabashed love for his country… this, in spite of the fact that in 1942 his country betrayed him,” note producers Dianne Fukami and Debra Nakatomi.

Presidents Clinton and Bush were recently interviewed for the documentary and educational curriculum. “[Mineta’s] family was in a Japanese internment camp in World War II, and it could have made him bitter, angry,” commented President Clinton, “but instead he used that…to deepen his own commitment; to make sure that people weren’t discriminated against or held back or held down. In that sense, he represents the very best of America.”

This quote will be one of many presented to students in the educational curriculum, which pivots around the essential question, “What does it mean to be an American?” When asked this question, President Bush referred not only to key values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but also to a sense of decency in the public square and to the nation’s communities of compassion. “It means that we care about each other. One of the real strengths of America [are] what I would call the ‘armies of compassion’…people in their communities who set up programs to feed the hungry or find shelter for the homeless, without the government telling them what to do.” He also referred to the United States’ long history of immigration, and said that being an American means recognizing that “although, on the one hand, we ought to enforce our laws, [on the other hand] we ought to welcome immigrants in a legal fashion, because immigrants reinvigorate our soul.”

Beyond Mineta’s groundbreaking achievements, Mineta epitomizes the dreams and aspirations of youth. He is the son of immigrants and his family was forcibly removed from his home to spend years in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. And yet, he remains a patriot, has led with integrity to achieve a long and distinguished career as a public servant, and continues to champion the underserved and mentor students.

The educational curriculum is being developed by Rylan Sekiguchi of SPICE in consultation with Fukami and Nakatomi and is targeted to high school and college educators and students. The curriculum will be offered free on the MLP and SPICE websites and is being developed in coordination with the documentary. The standards-aligned lesson plans will highlight six key themes connected to the life of Secretary Mineta—immigration, civil liberties & equity, civic engagement, justice & reconciliation, leadership & decision-making, and U.S.–Japan relations—and ask students to examine them in both historical and current-day contexts. Mineta himself has underscored the enduring relevance of these themes in U.S. society, for example drawing parallels between the Japanese-American experience following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and the Arab-American and Muslim-American experience following 9/11. As our country debates contentious topics such as deportations, immigration bans and restrictions, surveillance, and registries, the lessons learned from Mineta’s life can help us.

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Moon Jae-in was elected South Korea’s president on a pledge to address domestic inequality and to renew dialogue with North Korea. In the midst of Tuesday’s vote, Shorenstein APARC scholars offered insight to local and international media outlets.

Gi-Wook Shin, professor of sociology and director of Shorenstein APARC’s Korea Program, provided comment to The Economist about the challenges facing an administration led by Moon, a progressive candidate who is assuming power when an active conservative camp remains. He is also cited in an article in the New York Times focused on Moon's economic agenda and featured in a video from a Korea Society event that examines next steps for the new president.

Rennie Moon, the Koret Fellow in the Korea Program, co-authored an analysis piece on the East Asia Forum with Shin analyzing recent polls and the Moon administration's economic and security agenda.

Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC, wrote an analysis piece for The National Bureau of Asian Research. In the piece, he explores how the election could impact the U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance amid escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Kathleen Stephens, the William J. Perry Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, appeared in a live interview on CNBC. In the taping, she discusses the significance of the vote and the new administration’s priorities as Moon swiftly takes office following the removal of his predecessor.

China is encountering a religious resurgence. Its revival symbolizes tension between the past and the present, as people search for purpose in a country that’s been shaken by expansive reforms and modernization efforts over the past four decades.

That was the message shared by veteran journalist Ian Johnson, the 2016 winner of the Shorenstein Journalism Award, who gave a keynote speech followed by panel discussion titled “Religion after Mao,” part of the Award’s 15th anniversary ceremony at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center on Monday.

Johnson, who has spent 30 years as a journalist, has written extensively about Chinese history, religion and culture, and is also a teacher and published author, most recently releasing the book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao.

“Ian is maybe one of the most remarkable awardees we’ve had in recent years,” said Daniel Sneider, Shorenstein APARC associate director for research, who introduced the event by talking about Johnson’s distinguished career, which has included writing for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Review of Books and led to a Pulitzer Prize win in 2001.

Xueguang Zhou, a Stanford professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley, joined Johnson on the panel, while Sneider moderated the discussion.

In a wide-ranging conversation, the panelists discussed the varied history of religion in Chinese society during the 20th and 21st centuries, offering stories of their experiences living and working in China.

According to Johnson, religious persecution in China is often thought to be associated with the anti-religious campaigns of Mao Zedong following the Chinese Communist Party’s assumption of power in 1949, but in reality, it existed decades before and has lingered in national memory.

Into the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Chinese government remained superstitious of religion, trying to redefine religious groups as “culture” alone, under the assumption that religion could be desensitized enough to eventually disappear, Johnson said.

But that did not happen, he said, and instead an opposite trend did. Reaching a high point in the 2000s, China’s economic reforms – both sweeping and fast-paced – brought growing angst and anxiety and prompted people across every socioeconomic background to turn to religion as an outlet.

Johnson, who has spent weeks at a time living among religious groups, noted a shift from the time he was in China in the mid-1980s to the past decade, where now “the government sees that religious groups can provide some sort of moral framework for some people.”

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Chinese people today are searching for meaning, the panelists said, and are driven to join religious groups amid resource competition and mass migration that has usurped traditional family structures and disquieted many people who have moved from close-knit rural towns to alienating urban centers.

“Everybody is out there…trying to reify that part of life which isn’t filled by bread alone, by commerce alone,” said Schell, who has written about China since the 1970s as an author and journalist. “It’s a pretty chaotic quest and it’s very hard to know where it will all end.”

At the moment, religious groups in China remain heterogeneous and fragmented, Zhou said, but cohesion is growing in some regions and participation of local government leaders has drawn greater attention to the practice of faith.

“In grassroots China, religion, spiritual life and the Party, really go hand-in-hand – they’re intertwined,” said Zhou, whose research focuses on Chinese bureaucracy and economic development. “Local elites are involved both in the spiritual world and the Party world, and they shift back and forth simultaneously.”

However, the future of the relationship between religion and the government remains to be seen, according to the panelists.

Religious groups could fracture, or the government could continue to favor “native” religious groups, which if exacerbated over time, could lead to quasi-state religions, Johnson said. (Today, China recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam and Protestantism).

While religious groups increasingly provide a service to some people, the Chinese government continues to be wary of them as an alternative source of knowledge and values, Johnson said, which hold the potential to coalesce into a nascent civil society.

“Every dynasty in China knows that one way dynasties usually ended was with some millenarian movement,” Schell added of the government’s apprehension. “They are afraid of religious movements because they do bespeak of higher values, higher loyalties and different organizational structures that don’t owe fealty to the Party.”

A video of the keynote speech is posted at this link.