In Greenhalgh's 2005 China Quarterly article, the Kwakernaak citation and the Liang Zhongtang quote are two beats of one continuous narrative, not two facts merely sharing an author

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Two facts the vault had filed as belonging to separate Greenhalgh publications — the Kwakernaak 1977 citation (previously on file only from the 2003 article) and the Liang Zhongtang quote — in fact both live inside the same 2005 China Quarterly article, a few pages apart, inside one continuous narrative arc. The article runs from the Kwakernaak/Olsder–Strijbos citation (pp. 266–267, in "The policy solution: from missile control mathematics to population control mathematics"), across the next section heading ("Defence science politics: winning the policy battle"), into that section's subsection "Gaining converts to the cause" (pp. 268–271), which narrates Song Jian's group presenting its projections at the December 1979 Second National Symposium on Population Theory in Chengdu, and then, on p. 270: "Though publicly appreciative, in private the social scientists were largely hostile to the natural science takeover of their domain. The most outspoken, Liang Zhongtang of the Shanxi provincial Party school, warned of the coercion that would be required to enforce one-childization." The same paragraph continues: "China's population officials, by contrast, were very impressed... Chen Muhua publicly endorsed the Song work. She also rebuked Liang and dismissed his concerns about damaging social consequences" (p. 270). The Kwakernaak-derived optimization target (pp. 266–267) and Liang's objection to its enforcement consequences (p. 270) are sequential parts of a single narrative arc: the Dutch-control-theory optimization Song presented at Chengdu, and the social scientist who spoke against it there.

What this does not establish: no source states that Liang knew of, read, or specifically responded to the Kwakernaak or Olsder–Strijbos citations themselves. Liang's quoted objection concerns enforcement costs — coercion, labour shortages, rapid ageing — not the population-figure derivation Kwakernaak's work fed into. The connection Greenhalgh's text draws is one of narrative causation (the Dutch-derived target produced the projections presented at Chengdu; Liang objected to the resulting policy's human costs at that same meeting), not of Liang engaging the citation directly. The bridge is real and textually tight — same document, same page range, same symposium — but it connects a citation to an objection to what that citation eventually produced, not two arguments in direct dialogue.