Liang Zhongtang proposed a two-child alternative in 1979 that was set aside, then ran a two-child pilot in Yicheng County from 1985

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policyhistoriography

At the Second National Demography Symposium in Chengdu in 1979 — before the one-child policy was finalized — Liang Zhongtang proposed a two-child alternative to what became the one-child policy. Per Li Xueqing's Sixth Tone profile, drawing on direct quotes from Liang, the proposal "fell on deaf ears." Liang later ran a two-child pilot program in Yicheng County, Shanxi, from 1985 — an experiment that, per the same profile's title, went largely "ignored for three decades" despite operating in parallel with national policy.

This is a biographical anchor for Liang as a figure, not itself a resolution of his disputed historiographical argument against Greenhalgh's Song-Jian-centric account (see claim-whyte-wang-cai-frame-song-as-supplying-legitimation-not-originating-policy). It establishes that Liang was not a retrospective critic inventing objections after the fact — he had a concrete, dated, contemporaneous counter-proposal on the table at the moment the one-child policy was being decided, and independent standing (a real, decades-long pilot program) as a demographer with his own track record.