Song Jian's own October 1980 essay argues for one-child population control on scientific grounds, without claiming his projections caused the policy

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On 3 October 1980 — eight days after the 25 September 1980 Open Letter that launched the one-child policy — Guangming Daily published "从现代科学看人口 问题" ("Looking at the Population Problem from Modern Science"), credited to Song Jian. Read directly for the first time by this vault via its aisixiang.com repost, the essay argues in general systems-science, control-theory, and ecological-carrying-capacity terms for population control, and explicitly calls for the one-child measure: "应该在 今后30到40年的时期内大力提倡每对夫妇生育一个孩子" ("over the next 30 to 40 years we should vigorously promote one child per couple"). It frames that recommendation as a corrective and a cost rather than as something its own prior work triggered: "这是为了克服从60年代到70年代人口激增所造成的后果不得 不采取的紧急措施，是为了纠正我们过去在人口政策上所出现的错误所必须付出的代 价，是根据我国当前的实际情况权衡利弊而作出的最优选择" ("this is an emergency measure we are forced to take to overcome the consequences of the population surge of the 1960s–70s, a cost we must pay to correct past mistakes in population policy, and the optimal choice reached by weighing the pros and cons of our country's actual present circumstances"). Nowhere does Song state that his own 1980 projections caused the leadership's decision, in the manner Susan Greenhalgh's 2005 translation of his (different, 1995) essay has him saying (claim-song-jian-self-credited-1980-projections-triggered-one-child-policy).

This is not the 1995 essay the open question names and does not resolve it — it is an earlier, contemporaneous text. But in his own words, days after the policy's public launch, Song argues its necessity on scientific grounds without framing himself as its cause, a posture that reads more easily alongside Liang Zhongtang's "propagandist and justifier" framing than alongside the stronger self-credit line in Greenhalgh's 1995 translation. One essay from a different year is a thin basis for extending that comparison.