Seems pretty clear that he was clumsily trying to be polite to his host country even while criticizing its population policy. As Frank James pointed out on NPR’s political blog, it made “a certain amount of sense” for Biden to avoid doing anything “that would add to the tensions in U.S.-Chinese relations [a]fter a week in which Chinese and U.S. officials got into a shoving match at the Great Hall of the People and American and Chinese athletes got into an actual brawl.”

Everyone in D.C. with any power opposes China’s one-child policy or anything even vaguely similar, as does virtually everyone else in the rest of the country.