Ma Yinchu

Chinese economist and demographer (1882–1982), president of Peking University, whose 1957 "New Population Theory" argued for national population control on economic grounds and who was denounced and removed from his post after Mao Zedong rejected the idea; he was politically rehabilitated in 1979, a year before China's one-child policy took its final coercive shape.

Matters to this vault as the figure whose persecution — not Song Jian's causal role — turns out to be the best-attested subject of Liang Zhongtang's 2014 monograph: per two readers of the physical book — one reading it directly, the second known only as glossed by the first, so not independent attestations — its most substantively discussed content is two chapters defending Ma against the specific charge that Kang Sheng and Chen Boda personally orchestrated the 1959-60 campaign against him, material this vault had not previously connected to the Song Jian dispute at all.

References

• claim-liang-2014-book-most-discussed-content-is-ma-yinchu-not-song-jian
• claim-liang-2011-ma-yinchu-essay-shares-book-chapter-title-omits-song-jian
• claim-liu-shejian-2015-review-quantifies-ma-yinchu-content-over-half-book

Updates

• 2026-09-19: First appearance in the vault. A 2026-09-19 capture triangulating the unread 2014 book's content found that two independent readers — a Douban review and its gloss of a Unirule Institute critique — identify Ma Yinchu's persecution, not Song Jian's causal role, as the book's most-discussed material. (claim-liang-2014-book-most-discussed-content-is-ma-yinchu-not-song-jian)
• 2026-09-20: Two direct reads move past secondhand description: an essay sharing one "most-discussed" chapter's exact title contains zero mentions of Song Jian, and a named Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences reviewer of the standalone Ma Yinchu excerpt volume puts "more than half" the volume's pages on the single sub-thesis that Ma's criticism had no connection to Kang Sheng and Chen Boda, while also never mentioning Song Jian — the strongest direct corroboration yet that Ma Yinchu's persecution, not the Song Jian dispute, is this material's actual subject. (claim-liang-2011-ma-yinchu-essay-shares-book-chapter-title-omits-song-jian, claim-liu-shejian-2015-review-quantifies-ma-yinchu-content-over-half-book)
• 2026-09-27 (propagation-repair): Corrected the attestation framing carried by this page, including the 2026-09-19 entry above, which stands as written but is superseded on this point. Was: "two independent readers" of the 2014 book (a Douban review and a Unirule Institute critique) identify the Ma Yinchu chapters as its most-discussed content. Now: two readers, one reading the book directly and the second (Zhang Shuguang) known only as glossed by the first — the attestations are not independent. Propagated from the 2026-09-20 correction to claim-liang-2014-book-most-discussed-content-is-ma-yinchu-not-song-jian.
• 2026-09-28 (propagation-repair): Corrected the scope of the SASS reviewer's "more than half" figure in the 2026-09-20 entry above. Was: the figure quantifies the excerpt volume's Ma Yinchu content generally. Now: it quantifies the space given to one sub-thesis — that Ma's criticism had no connection to Kang Sheng and Chen Boda — since the volume 《马寅初考》 is wholly about Ma Yinchu and the general reading would need no number. Propagated from the 2026-09-22 correction to claim-liu-shejian-2015-review-quantifies-ma-yinchu-content-over-half-book.