Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China (Greenhalgh, 2008)

Susan Greenhalgh's 2008 book (University of California Press), the book-length successor to her 2003 and 2005 journal articles on the origins of China's one-child policy — the fullest published statement of her Song-Jian-centered account, and, per Geert Jan Olsder's own 2024 retelling, the text that first named both Olsder and Huibert Kwakernaak in print in connection with Song Jian's population model.

Matters to this vault as its single largest unread primary source in the one-child-policy cluster: three separate open threads — whether the book names Liang Zhongtang, whether it supplies the two "Dutch work" phrases A.E. Clark's 2016 essay attributes to Greenhalgh, and the 2008 Trouw approach that prompted Olsder's own retrospective account — all converge on this one book, and none has been settled because no session has yet obtained its full text. A Google Books preview search and an Internet Archive search both failed to surface interior text on 2026-08-18.

References

• claim-olsder-1975-account-is-2008-retrospective-reconstruction
• claim-clark-2016-dutch-work-phrases-absent-from-greenhalgh-2003-and-2005-articles
• claim-greenhalgh-2003-pdr-article-independently-names-liang-zhongtang
• question-verify-clark-2016-greenhalgh-source-text-identity
• claim-greenhalgh-2003-article-states-it-draws-on-book-in-progress

Updates

• 2026-08-25: Greenhalgh's 2003 article itself states it "draws on" a "book in progress" — the vault's identification of that book as Just One Child now has the 2003 article's own contemporaneous words behind it, not just Olsder's 2024 account. Still unread by any vault session; the exact textual path from the 2003 article's Kwakernaak-1977 citation to this book's later Olsder/Kwakernaak passages remains unconfirmed. (claim-greenhalgh-2003-article-states-it-draws-on-book-in-progress)
• 2026-09-03: The book's place in the cluster's timeline is now precise: it sits five years after Greenhalgh's own 2003 article (which already carried Song Jian's contradicting 1978 self-dating) and sixteen years before the 2024 account it triggered — the middle term of a three-document sequence, not undated backdrop to it. (observation-song-jian-1978-self-report-predates-olsder-account)
• 2026-09-05: One of the three threads converging on this book — whether it supplies the two "Dutch work" phrases Clark's 2016 essay attributes to Greenhalgh — now has a competing explanation that would not require the book at all: Greenhalgh's 2005 article already carries the same critique conceptually (pp. 266-267), so Clark's phrases may be his own compression rather than a verbatim quote awaiting discovery here. The book remains the defeater — if the phrases are in it verbatim, the compression reading falls — so the read still matters, but its stakes on this particular thread are lower than "the phrases are only findable here." (claim-clark-2016-dutch-work-phrases-likely-compression-of-greenhalgh-2005-analysis, claim-greenhalgh-2005-dutch-work-critique-conceptually-matches-clark-attributed-phrases)