A.E. Clark's 2016 essay names Paul Ehrlich directly and credits The Population Bomb, alongside Limits to Growth, as one of two texts Song Jian imported from Helsinki

chinaone-child-policypaul-ehrlichlaw-libertysong-jianembedding-false-friend

A full re-read of A.E. Clark's "Illegitimate Birth of the One-Child Policy" (Law & Liberty, 8 January 2016) — beyond the single Song-Jian-focused excerpt the vault's existing note on this essay (claim-ae-clark-2016-essay-credits-song-jian-omits-liang-zhongtang) quotes — finds the essay naming Paul Ehrlich specifically, not only the Club of Rome, as the source of the overpopulation alarm Song Jian drew on in 1978: "The alarm had been spread to a mass audience through the writings of Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome." The essay goes on to place Ehrlich's own book alongside the Club of Rome's report as the two specific texts Song is said to have carried back from Helsinki: "He found in The Population Bomb (1968) and The Limits to Growth (1972), which he picked up in Helsinki, a set of tables, images, and metaphors that he would reproduce in China (without attribution) as the judgment of modern science on human population." This is recorded at the detail level the essay itself gives, without independent corroboration of Song's actual reading list — a historical/biographical claim, Tier 2, resting on Susan Greenhalgh's account as Clark's sole scholarly source.

This closes the open question this capture targeted and resolves observation-lawliberty-ehrlich-cross-time-villain-bridge-unconfirmed in favor of a genuine same-villain repeat: the same Law & Liberty venue names Ehrlich as the historical source of demographic panic at both ends of its ten-year, opposite-panic arc — once for the overpopulation anxiety feeding a coercive one-child policy, once for the anti-natalist anxiety Rachel Lu's 2026 essay argues against.