In Greenhalgh's 2005 China Quarterly article, the 1976-leadership-consensus sentence sits at the head of the same 13-page narrative arc that runs to the Kwakernaak citation and Liang Zhongtang's dissent

chinapopulation-policyone-child-policyhistoriographycold-war-sciencegreenhalghsong-jiancitation-genealogy

The 1976-consensus sentence ("After Mao's death in 1976, a strong consensus had emerged at the highest levels of government that the rapid growth of a largely rural population was a major obstacle to the achievement of the 'four modernizations'") sits on p. 258 of Greenhalgh's 2005 China Quarterly article, in the section "A leader in defence conversion: the appeal of population cybernetics" (pp. 258–260) — immediately before that section's account of Song Jian's mid-1978 Helsinki trip. Through "Defence Science Resources" (pp. 260–263) and "A Sinified Cybernetics of Population" (pp. 263–268), the same document continues into the Kwakernaak citation (pp. 266–267) and then "Defence Science Politics" (pp. 268–274), which contains the December 1979 Chengdu symposium and Liang's dissent (pp. 269–270) — the same Kwakernaak-then-Liang narrative already on file. The 1976-consensus sentence is therefore not a free-floating concession elsewhere in the article: it opens the same continuous 13-page run (pp. 258–270) that the existing observation note documents from p. 266 onward, extending that arc's starting point four sections earlier — from the political backdrop, through Song's Helsinki encounter and the Sinified optimization target, to Liang's objection at Chengdu.

This textual proximity connects the 1976-consensus fact to the 2005 article's own Kwakernaak-then-Liang sequence. It does not, by itself, establish that the same fact recurs in the 2003 article's independent echo of that narrative structure — see claim-greenhalgh-2003-article-lacks-1976-leadership-consensus-parallel for that separate, negative finding.