Liang Zhongtang's rejection of Song Jian's policy-origination claim is structured as one of three rival-theory rejections, including a Liu Zheng priority claim, and its core verdict persists almost unchanged from a 2007 draft to the 2009 published essay

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Section 5 of a 2007 draft of a Liang Zhongtang essay on the era background of the one-child policy, "「一胎化」产生的时代背景 研究（修改稿）" — an earlier version of the essay lineage underlying claim-liang-zhongtang-2009-rejects-song-jian-causal-self-credit and claim-liang-2009-frames-song-jian-as-propagandist-not-originator — is headed "'一胎化'的发明权究竟是谁？" ("Whose invention was 'one-child-ization', really?") and evaluates three candidate originator theories in turn: a "the masses wanted it" theory, a theory crediting demographer Liu Zheng (刘铮) and colleagues, and "关于宋健说" (the Song Jian theory). Each is addressed at length before being rejected. The draft's verdict on the Song Jian theory — that Song and his colleagues, still researchers at the time, could at most have served as propagandists and justifiers for a policy already put forward by national leaders — is essentially the same sentence Liang later published in his 2009 CUHK essay (see claim-liang-2009-frames-song-jian-as-propagandist-not-originator), carried across at least three years and two hosting venues with only minor wording changes.

This matters to the question of the 2014 book's content weighting (see question-verify-liang-zhongtang-2014-book-content-weighting) because it shows that wherever Liang writes specifically about the one-child policy's origin — the topic the book's catalog abstract separately lists as a fourth chapter, see claim-liang-2014-book-catalog-abstract-names-2009-essay-title-as-content — his engagement with Song Jian's causal claim is sustained and rebuttal-oriented across multiple drafts and years, not a passing mention. This contrasts with the near-total absence of Song Jian found directly in the book's two Ma Yinchu-focused chapters (see 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). Liu Zheng, named here as a second, earlier-established rival claimant to originating "一胎化," had not previously appeared in the vault.