aisixiang.com's single "宋健" author tag silently merges at least two distinct real people

chinapopulation-policysong-jiansource-hazardhistoriographyaisixiang

aisixiang.com (爱思想), a Chinese public-interest academic-archive site, tags at least two essays under one undifferentiated author name, "宋健," that in fact belong to two different people. One is this vault's Song Jian (b. 1931), the aerospace-engineer-turned- science-official: his 1985 essay "工程控制论" ("Engineering Cybernetics") opens by tracing the term to Qian Xuesen's 1954 book of the same title and reads throughout as the entity's own established voice and expertise. The other is a living demographer: the site's 2023 essay "不忧不惧：理性面对中国 人口发展新形势" carries the byline "作者：中国人民大学人口与发展研究中心副主 任、教授、博导 宋健" ("Author: Song Jian, Deputy Director, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, Center for Population and Development Studies, Renmin University of China") — explicitly a contemporary population-studies scholar, identified by a Renmin University demography post the vault's Song Jian (the 1931-born aerospace engineer) never held. (An earlier wording of this sentence rested on the entity's "(1931–2023)" death dating; that dating is an unresolved discrepancy in the vault's own record — entity-song-jian's 2026-08-16 entry notes a June 2024 article describing him in the present tense — so the distinction is anchored to the byline's institutional identity instead, which carries the claim on its own.) aisixiang.com's "相同作者阅读" (same-author reading) sidebar lists both pieces, and others, under one unbroken "宋健" tag, with no disambiguating note anywhere on the site.

This is read directly from each page's own byline, not inferred from a secondary description, and is recorded as a sourcing caution rather than a discovery about either person. Any future session treating that sidebar as a bibliography of this vault's Song Jian — rather than checking each byline individually — risks attributing a living demographer's 2023 policy commentary to the deceased missile scientist this vault otherwise documents, or the reverse.