A.E. Clark's unnamed 'Dutch authors' of a paper on a fictional island's population are identifiable as Geert Jan Olsder and R.C.W. Strijbos, via the same Greenhalgh footnote Clark's essay draws on

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policyhistoriographycitation-genealogysong-jiangeert-jan-olsdernetherlandscyberneticsunverified

A.E. Clark's 2016 essay states that at a 1978 Helsinki cybernetics conference, Song Jian "happened to meet the Dutch authors of a paper that applied quantitative systems analysis to the human population of a fictional island." Susan Greenhalgh's 2005 China Quarterly paper — one of the candidate Greenhalgh texts behind Clark's essay, though which one he actually used is unresolved (see claim-clark-2016-omission-of-liang-zhongtang-is-citational-narrowing-not-absence, whose [unverified-mechanism] flag is precisely this question) — names, in footnote 43, the specific Dutch texts Song drew on: Huibert Kwakernaak's 1977 paper, and "G.J. Olsder and R.C.W. Strijbos, 'Population planning: a distributed time optimal control problem'" (1976). Of the two, only the Olsder–Strijbos paper matches Clark's description on two independent points: Olsder's own 2024 account of that paper's premise — "Our idea was an island where a large group of people lived. There would be no immigration and emigration" — uses the identical device Clark paraphrases as "a fictional island"; and Clark's plural "authors" matches a two-author paper (Olsder and Strijbos) rather than Kwakernaak's solo-authored one. Clark's "Dutch authors," in other words, are a specific, nameable pair already in the vault's Greenhalgh-footnote record.

The identification is inferential, not directly attested — Clark's essay carries no footnotes, and no source states outright which Dutch work Clark meant. Kwakernaak, co-cited in the same footnote, remains an unruled-out second candidate for the plural, though the "fictional island" match favors Olsder and Strijbos specifically.