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Updated Sunday, May 25, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Daniel J. Bauer, Special to The China Post

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‘Christine’ not echo nor clone of Hillary

Within hours of President Ma’s election two months ago, an interesting story with a few ethical sensitivities caught my eye. The story focused more on the wife of the president-elect than on himself. Now, on the very heels of his inauguration, President Ma has made an announcement that immediately drew dramatic headlines in major Chinese newspapers.

When Ma Ying-jeou was first elected, the media claimed the public was chomping at the bit to know whether the new first lady would still go to work every day as an attorney for Mega International Commercial Bank after her husband’s inauguration. Would Mrs. Ma give up her career in order to settle more smoothly into various social and political expectations as the nation’s first lady?

In those first frenetic days of planning his new administration, the president-elect commented more than once that his wife had always liked “her job,” and that perhaps it was best to leave it to Mrs. Ma to make her own decision about what to do.

Now the president says that his wife has applied for early retirement. The better, it seems, to devote herself and her energies to projects more traditionally suitable (is that the right phrase?) for a first lady than proffering advice on sensitive legal questions in the volatile world of high finance.

Mrs. Ma’s retirement brings a sigh of relief to ethics teachers and others in the country who might have feared her continued presence in banking would have made the new administration an easy target for charges of conflict of interest, influence-peddling, or other sorts of iffy entanglements.

The Chinese United Daily News says a beloved uncle and older sister of the president will be also be stepping aside from their business-related positions.

After observing the barrage of accusations of corruption against the former first lady and her husband, it is, well, reassuring to note the new president’s desire to protect that pristine image of his.

At the same time, the “feminist” in me feels just a little sad that so many in our society appear to have assumed that Mrs. Ma would (of course!) surrender her right to a lucrative and satisfying career and become, in the blink of an eye, a whole-hearted and full-time appendage to her husband’s career.

Another phenomenon related to this question of assumptions about women also arises. Soon after Mr. Ma’s election, some in the media began to refer to the new first lady by an English first name. It was “Christine” this and “Christine” that for a week or so. I don’t know about you, but I cringed every time I saw that type of familiarity.

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