Greenhalgh's 2008 book's own Table 3 independently gives a June 1978 date for the policy rule Liang Zhongtang's 2009 essay treats as the one-child policy's origin

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policyhistoriographyliang-zhongtanggreenhalghjust-one-childcitation-genealogybridge-seed

Greenhalgh's Just One Child Introduction contains a table the vault had not previously read: "Table 3: The Evolution of the One-Child Policy," tracking four successive birth rules by when each was announced by a Program Leader and codified in a Central Document. Row [1] reads: Policy Rule "Best is one, at most two; eliminate third births," announced by the Program Leader in "June 1978 (LG)," codified in a Central Document in "October 1978," with a second codification, "January 1979," attributed to "BP directors" at a national meeting. A footnote decodes "LG = Leading Group; BP directors = birth planning directors."

This is, independently, almost exactly the chronology Liang Zhongtang's 2009 essay gives for the policy's origin: a June 1978 meeting of the State Council family-planning Leading Group recommending "one is best, two at most," ratified by Central Committee Document No. 69, which the vault's existing audit of Liang's essay dates to 26 October 1978 — the same month Table 3 independently gives for codification. Liang's own essay states: "given that both the leading group's own meeting report and the Party Central Committee's 1978 Document No. 69 confirm that this meeting proposed 'one is best, two at most,' we have reason to regard the 'three-day meeting' as the instigator (始作俑者) of the 'one-child' policy."

This closes a gap in the vault's citation-genealogy work on this cluster: the existing independent corroboration of the June 1978 date rested solely on a different Greenhalgh document, her 2003 Population and Development Review article (claim-greenhalgh-2003-article-independently-corroborates-june-1978-leading-group-meeting). Table 3 is a second instance of Greenhalgh's own text carrying that date — in the same chapter and PDF that names Liang in Table 1 (claim-greenhalgh-2008-book-table-1-names-liang-zhongtang-as-key-actor), a bare name-to-era entry that carries no date of its own. The bridge between those two notes runs through this table, not through Table 1. 2003 and 2008 are the same author's two publications, not two independent scholars — per the vault's single-source-concentration discipline, this is one primary witness's account recurring in two of her own documents, not a second independent confirmation. Separately, Table 1's own "Early Deng era (1977-1980)" row independently places Chen Muhua as the row's sole Program Leader, alongside Liang's Shanxi Party School entry — matching her institutional role as the Leading Group's head without the table itself naming the specific meeting; this is structural, not event-level, corroboration, and the event-level date comes from Table 3 above, not Table 1.

This is a quantitative claim (specific months) resting on a direct Tier 1 read of Greenhalgh's own book, re-fetched this session with TLS verified — it clears the sourcing floor for a quantitative claim without qualification.