Greenhalgh's 2003 PDR article carries no 1976-dated equivalent to the 2005 article's leadership-consensus sentence, but asserts the same substance at pp. 185-186, dated 1978-79 instead

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The 2005 China Quarterly article's 1976-consensus sentence — "After Mao's death in 1976, a strong consensus had emerged at the highest levels of government that the rapid growth of a largely rural population was a major obstacle to the achievement of the 'four modernizations'" — has no year-dated equivalent anywhere in Greenhalgh's 2003 Population and Development Review article. In the opening sections the closest passage is vaguer and undated to a specific year: "With the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, the planned control of population growth became a critical component of China's socialist modernization" (p. 167) — no "1976," no "strong consensus," and no "four modernizations... major obstacle" language.

The substance of the 2005 sentence does recur, however, outside those opening sections. In "The policy impact of the control theorists" (pp. 185–186), the 2003 article states that "much evidence suggests that between mid-1978 and mid-1979, China's top leaders and population policymakers were moving toward adoption of a policy encouraging one-child families," and then, flatly: "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." That is a leadership-consensus assertion of the same weight as the 2005 sentence, in the same author's voice, differing chiefly in that it is anchored to 1978–79 rather than to 1976 and drops the "four modernizations" phrasing.

What is genuinely 2005-only, then, is the dating — the attachment of the consensus to the moment of Mao's death in 1976 — not the consensus claim itself. That still distinguishes the 1976-consensus fact from the Kwakernaak-then-Liang narrative structure, which recurs across both articles in recognizable form. But the distinction is narrower than a straight negative result: the two articles agree that the leadership was already of one mind before Song Jian's projections landed, and disagree only on how far back that agreement is pushed.