Greenhalgh's 2003 article frames China's population 'crisis' framing as substantially manufactured starting mid-1979, in apparent tension with her 2005 article's 'strong consensus' by 1976 — a tension the 2003 article's own later sections largely dissolve

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Greenhalgh's two accounts of the same run-up period, read directly against each other, describe it in visibly different terms. The 2003 Population and Development Review article's central argument is that a sense of population crisis — as opposed to population control merely being on the reform agenda — was substantially manufactured by the natural scientists starting in 1979: "China throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s officially had no population crisis," and "China's official stance, articulated forcefully at Bucharest, was that population explosions were Malthusian concoctions imposed on the third world by the superpowers... Marxist China could have no population crisis" (p. 172) — until "by mid-1979... China suddenly faced a virtual population crisis, one that was ruining the country's chance of achieving the four modernizations by century's end" (p. 172, section "A virtual crisis is born"). As late as mid-1978, per the same article, Hua Guofeng "justified the harsh restrictions on reproduction then in place in terms of the necessity of planning in a socialist society" (p. 172) — planning-based reasoning, not crisis-based reasoning.

This sits awkwardly against the 2005 article's claim that "a strong consensus had emerged at the highest levels of government" by 1976 "that the rapid growth of a largely rural population was a major obstacle to the achievement of the 'four modernizations'" (p. 258). The two are not a direct contradiction — "a strong consensus that growth was a major obstacle" (2005) is compatible with "no official crisis language" (2003) if read narrowly, since consensus about an obstacle is not the same as declaring a crisis — and on a full reading the 2003 article closes most of the gap itself, twice.

First, at p. 176 Greenhalgh explicitly refuses the strong reading of her own argument: "My point here is not that China had no population crisis. By all accounts, in the late 1970s China's rapid population growth was slowing economic development and harming the environment. My point, rather, is that the formulation of those relationships as a virtual crisis reflected a particular Western perspective and required a particular solution." Second, at pp. 185–186 she asserts a leadership consensus in her own voice: "My research has produced no evidence that the central leadership was internally divided on the population question. To the contrary, a whole pantheon of top leaders was on record stating that excessive population growth was a serious problem keeping China 'backward' and had to be firmly addressed as part of China's modernization program."

What the 2003 article calls manufactured, then, is the crisis framing — the numbers, tables, graphs and "only choice" rhetoric — not the leadership's underlying agreement that population growth was a serious obstacle, which is the thing the 2005 sentence asserts. The residue is a dating difference rather than a disagreement about substance: the 2005 article places the consensus at Mao's death in 1976; the 2003 article places the leadership's convergence "between mid-1978 and mid-1979" (p. 185) and never dates it to 1976. Both articles agree the political will preceded Song Jian's projections.