Greenhalgh's own sentence frames Song Jian's 1995 self-credit line as addressed to his professional field, not to a population-policy audience

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policysong-jiansusan-greenhalghself-attributionprimary-sourcehistoriographycyberneticscold-war-scienceunverified

claim-song-jian-self-credited-1980-projections-triggered-one-child-policy records the self-credit line itself; claim-greenhalgh-footnote-pins-song-jian-1995-essay-citation pins its bibliographic home. Neither existing note carries the sentence's own introductory clause. Susan Greenhalgh's full sentence, read directly from her 2005 China Quarterly paper (pp. 253–254 — the passage opens at the foot of p. 253 and the framing clause and quotation both fall on p. 254), states: "The most significant clue is the key role of a set of population projections by the control theorist Song Jian. In Western publications in his field of systems science and control theory, Song has claimed credit for authoring the policy: '[Our 1980 projections] shocked the scientific circles and politicians, [leading the government to] follow a policy of "one child system".'"

The phrase "in Western publications in his field of systems science and control theory" describes the self-credit line's declared genre and venue: not a population-policy retrospective aimed at demographers or historians, but a piece written within control theory's own disciplinary literature — a reading consistent with the essay's title, "System science and policy-making," and with footnote 3's citation to a 1999 Chinese collected-scientific-papers volume rather than a population-studies venue. "Western" most plausibly modifies systems science and control theory as an imported discipline, not the essay's own language of publication, since footnote 3 cites a Chinese-language volume from a Beijing press — a surface tension the sentence itself does not resolve.