South Korean hip-hop girl band 2NE1's hit single I Don't Care is blaring on the radio of the golf buggy taking a group of lazy journalists the short distance from the media village to the main press centre. It is catchy and I try to move to the music, much to the amusement of the volunteer driving the cart and the other journos on board. It's early in the morning and what better way to get into the swing of things than to listen to Park Bom.
Her free-spirited lyrics, however, would not go down well in a country where the controversial one-child policy is very much in effect in urban areas. They care very much and this is why condoms are aggressively marketed and freely available everywhere. Even the Games organisers have got into the act, providing free condoms to all athletes and officials. Jissbon, the official donor to the Games, has come up with a special edition of Asian Games condoms with the packets cleverly named.
One urges users to 'don't peak too early' while another boasts of 'flawless entry'. I don't know about the one which says 'it's a team sport'. I wonder what the women's cricket team who have already returned to Hong Kong, or the men's hockey team who have been royally hammered to the tune of 19 goals by India and Pakistan, thought about that.
China didn't always have a one-child policy. In the 1960s and '70s, many parents had large families. Shirley, one of the first volunteers I met, comes from a large family by current standards. She has two elder sisters and a younger brother. She is happy.
That is not the case with Blair, a reporter with the Southern Metropolitan newspaper in Guangzhou. She is the only child and says she yearns for company.
During Chairman Mao's rule, from 1949 to 1976, having more children was regarded as good. The little red book extolled those values, for Mao felt having a large population would turn China into a great power. He was right. Today China has more than 1.3 billion people, making it the world's most populous country. It accounts for 20 per cent of the global population of roughly 6.7 billion. These numbers have also translated into economic might.
