Chen Yun

Senior Chinese Communist Party leader and economic planner (1905–1995), one of the so-called "Eight Elders" of the post-Mao era and a chief architect of China's planned-economy reforms, who — per Susan Greenhalgh's account — proposed in late spring 1979 "the formulation of a law limiting couples to one child."

Matters to this vault as a second, independently named political-will data point: alongside Deng Xiaoping's March 1979 birth-planning directive, Chen's proposal places top CCP leadership behind one-child restriction before Song Jian's cybernetics- derived population projections reached policymakers in 1980 — part of the evidentiary basis for Greenhalgh's own claim that the leadership was already of one mind on the question.

References

• observation-greenhalgh-2003-kwakernaak-citation-and-consensus-passage-share-one-run