Whyte, Wang & Cai's 2015 essay and the vault's Liang seed note disagree by five years on when the Yicheng two-child pilot began — 1980 versus 1985, an unresolved discrepancy

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policyhistoriographyliang-zhongtangwhyte-wang-caiyichengunverifiedcontested-dating

Whyte, Wang & Cai's own text states Yicheng, Shanxi was "implementing a two-child rather than a one-child policy since 1980," attributing the finding to Yan Wei and Li Zhang's 2014 re-examination. The vault's existing seed note on Liang Zhongtang, sourced to Li Xueqing's 2016 Sixth Tone profile of Liang himself, states "Liang's experiment began in July 1985, when he was director of the institute of population at the Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences" (claim-liang-zhongtang-1979-two-child-proposal-and-1985-yicheng-pilot). These are direct, specific date claims about the same program in the same county, five years apart.

The discrepancy is recorded here as found, not resolved. Yan Wei and Li Zhang's own 2014 article — the single source both this note and Whyte-Wang-Cai's own essay point to as the authoritative account — is paywalled at The China Journal and was not read this session, so there is no way yet to determine which date is correct, or whether the two accounts describe different starting points (an informal local start versus a formal county-level authorization, for instance). One source is Tier 1 on this specific figure (Whyte, Wang & Cai, reporting another scholarly team's finding) and the other is Tier 3 (Liang's own decades-later retelling through a journalist) — the tier gap does not by itself settle a direct factual conflict between two named, dated claims. See the companion note on the citation gap this same Whyte-Wang-Cai passage opens (claim-whyte-wang-cai-cite-yan-wei-li-zhang-not-liang-for-yicheng-pilot).