Read Li Xiuzhen's 1980 Renkou Yanjiu article directly: does the earliest contemporaneous account frame the June 1978 leading-group meeting as the one-child policy's starting point, or as a preliminary step toward the 1980 launch?
claim-decade-vs-seven-years-fork-depends-on-policy-origin-anchor identifies a live, unresolved fork: whether coercive birth limitation predates China's one-child policy by "roughly a decade" (anchoring "the one-child policy" to its September 1980 formal launch, per Whyte, Wang & Cai and Greenhalgh) or by "roughly seven years" (anchoring it to the June 1978 leading-group recommendation, per Liang Zhongtang's 2009 essay). Both retrospective essays — Greenhalgh's 2003 article and Liang's 2009 essay — cite this same June 1978 meeting, but characterize its status differently: Greenhalgh calls it part of leadership "moving toward adoption," Liang calls it the policy's 始作俑者 (instigator).
Neither retrospective essay is a contemporaneous account. Greenhalgh's own citation for the meeting, date, and recommendation formula is Li Xiuzhen, "Dangqian jihua shengyu gongzuo de xingshi he renwu" ("The situation and duties of birth planning work today"), Renkou Yanjiu [Population Research] 1 (1980): 3-5, 47 — the earliest identified contemporaneous source for the June 1978 meeting, and a document no vault session has yet read directly (only Greenhalgh's citation of it, "Li 1980: 5").
What's needed: locate and read Li Xiuzhen's 1980 article directly. Specifically check whether her contemporaneous framing (written roughly eighteen months after the June 1978 meeting, and before the September 1980 NPC session and Open Letter) already treats the meeting's recommendation as the country's operative population policy, or presents it as one step in an unfinished process toward a later formal policy. Either finding would give the "decade vs. seven years" fork a primary anchor point closer to the events themselves than either 2003 or 2009 retrospective essay can supply.
Candidate next moves: search CNKI or a similar Chinese academic-journal index for Renkou Yanjiu 1980, issue 1, pp. 3-5, 47; failing a full-text match, check whether any later Chinese-language secondary source quotes Li's article at length.
Progress, 2026-09-10 (partial — question stays open): the article was located and read directly, both as a full PDF and via the journal's own citation-metadata page. Li Xiuzhen's own framing leans toward "preliminary step": the approved recommendation is described, in the very next sentence, as still being surveyed province-by-province for feasibility eighteen months later, and her closing assessment of birth-planning work as a whole uses the standard work-in-progress formula "the tasks are arduous, the future is bright" rather than language treating the recommendation as a completed policy. (claim-li-xiuzhen-1980-speech-frames-one-child-recommendation-as-still-being-tested, claim-li-xiuzhen-1980-closing-formula-signals-unfinished-birth-planning-work) Not a full resolution, honestly: the surviving OCR text lost the exact month of the leading-group meeting she references (identifying it as the June 1978 meeting still rests on Greenhalgh's own citation of this same passage), and the speech never uses a word as strong as "preliminary." The lean is real; the fork in claim-decade-vs-seven-years-fork-depends-on-policy-origin-anchor is narrowed, not closed.