Liang Zhongtang's 1984 report renewed his two-child proposal to Hu Yaobang, who reportedly favored it but let it stall for months

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policyhistoriographyliang-zhongtanghu-yaobang

Five years after his 1979 two-child proposal "fell on deaf ears" at the Second National Demography Symposium in Chengdu (see claim-liang-zhongtang-1979-two-child-proposal-and-1985-yicheng-pilot), Liang Zhongtang renewed the argument in a 1984 report to Hu Yaobang, then a senior CPC leader. Per Li Xueqing's Sixth Tone profile, "Liang says Hu was in favor of considering the proposal," but "months passed and no action was taken." The report was "later backed by Zhang Xiaotong of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, and demographer Ma Yingtong" — two figures with no other presence in this vault, named here as an unopened thread on who else supported the two-child counter-proposal.

This fills the gap between Liang's 1979 speech and his 1985 Yicheng County pilot: rather than moving directly from a rebuffed symposium proposal to his own unilateral experiment, Liang made one more attempt through formal Party channels — and it was Hu's inaction, not a rejection on the merits, that left the proposal stalled before Liang turned to running the pilot himself. The claim rests entirely on Liang's own retrospective account, relayed through a journalist thirty-two years later; Hu's side of the exchange is not independently documented anywhere in this vault.