Liang Zhongtang's own 2009 essay states the one-child policy's origin has 'hardly any connection' to Song Jian's 1980 projections, predating them by about twenty months

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policyhistoriographycontested-causationcold-war-scienceprimary-sourceunverified

Writing in his own words in a 2009 essay for Twenty-First Century Bimonthly (CUHK), demographer Liang Zhongtang states — translation for this capture, not independently cross-checked against a published English rendering — that "chronologically speaking, the emergence of the 'one-child' policy has hardly any connection to Song Jian's 'scientific predictions.' The 'one-child' policy can be traced at the earliest to June 1978. By the time Song Jian and his colleagues surfaced publicly in February 1980, the one-child birth policy was already like an arrow loosed from the bow, a bullet fired from the barrel — already being implemented." This is a direct rejection of Song Jian's own 1995 self-credit for triggering the policy, dated by Liang to a roughly twenty-month gap between the policy's June 1978 origin and Song's February 1980 public emergence.

The claim independently corroborates, from a different source and angle, the "leadership already moving before Song" thesis recorded in claim-china-leadership-contemplated-one-child-policy-1978-before-song (Whyte, Wang & Cai's 2015 citation of Liang) — but this is Liang's own primary text, not a secondary account of him, closing a gap the vault had flagged and left open since 2026-07-11 (see question-verify-greenhalgh-song-one-child-policy-causal-role).