Cultural differences can be hard to fathom

Republican presidential hopeful of the United States, Mitt Romney, last week revealed his ignorance of the reality in China. Romney said that on Day One he "will cut off funding for the United Nations Population Fund which supports China's barbaric one-child policy".

Romney may never have that Day One, but watching the escalating wars on birth control, abortion, gays and sex, I started to wonder if the US is still a progressive country.

If you talk to Chinese citizens, you will find that the vast majority support family planning as a national policy. The population pressure is real in a country where 1.37 billion people, four times the US population, crowd in a land only slightly bigger than the United States, but with far larger uninhabited areas of deserts and ice-topped mountains.