Whyte, Wang & Cai's 2015 essay opens its substantive argument through the Yicheng two-child pilot, citing Yan Wei & Li Zhang's 2014 re-examination rather than naming Liang Zhongtang as the pilot's architect

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Whyte, Wang & Cai's "Challenging Myths About China's One-Child Policy" opens its substantive argument not with Song Jian or Greenhalgh, but with Yicheng, Shanxi — the same county named as the site of Liang Zhongtang's pilot in claim-liang-zhongtang-1979-two-child-proposal-and-1985-yicheng-pilot: "Issue No. 72 of The China Journal contains a very interesting analysis by Yan Wei and Li Zhang of the record of Yicheng, Shanxi, in implementing a two-child rather than a one-child policy since 1980." They return to Yicheng later in the essay, citing the same Yan Wei and Li Zhang analysis to show the county's fertility decline predated the national one-child launch, "as well as in Shanxi Province generally, prior to the launching of the one-child policy."

Neither passage names Liang Zhongtang as the pilot's architect. The essay cites Yan Wei and Li Zhang's scholarly re-examination of the program, not Liang's own account, and elsewhere cites Liang only for his 2014 books on the policy's general history (footnotes 15, 22 — see claim-whyte-wang-cai-cite-liang-2014-books-not-2009-essay), never in connection with Yicheng specifically. A Tier-1 anglophone source treats the pilot as established scholarship through a co-authored re-examination, without the chain of citation ever reaching back to the person whose seed-note biography the vault already has on file — matching the citation-gap pattern this cluster has already documented once before for a different claim (observation-whyte-wang-cai-and-olsder-liang-dispute-share-a-blind-spot). Co-authorship of the one cited paper is a mention, not a hub, for Yan Wei and Li Zhang; neither has independent standing in this vault beyond that single, unread, paywalled article (Yan Wei and Li Zhang, "Re-examination of the Yicheng Two-Child Program," The China Journal, No. 72, July 2014, pp. 98-120).

See also the companion observation that Greenhalgh's 2003 essay, not Whyte-Wang-Cai's, is the text that actually bridges to Liang directly (observation-greenhalgh-2003-bridges-liang-1979-yicheng-and-three-stage-timeline-seed-notes), and the separate, unresolved date conflict this same passage opens up (claim-whyte-wang-cai-and-liang-disagree-on-yicheng-pilot-start-date).