Photos of life after China's devastating one-child policy

In 'The Land of Promises', photographer Youqine Lefèvre explores the aftermath of China's population control policy through the lens of her own adoption.

Youqine Lefèvre, in her own words, “shouldn’t exist”. She was the second child born to middle-class parents in China during the country’s one-child policy, which restricted families to a single child as part of a government initiative to curb population growth. Implemented in 1979 and abolished in 2016, the consequences of the policy have been devastating and far-reaching. Now a visual artist based in Brussels, Lefèvre’s work attempts to pin down the tangled emotions about her origins.

In a new self-published photography book called The Land of Promises, Lefèvre explores her story. At just two months old, her biological parents left her alone in Yueyang city to avoid government punishment. The resident who found her handed her over to the authorities, but her parents never came forward. Lefèvre’s was then sent to infant to an orphanage, where she was adopted by a Belgian couple seven months later. The moment her adoptive parents held her in their arms, they considered Lefèvre their own – so much so that she didn’t know she was different until she faced microaggressions in her new country.

If you ask Lefèvre, she’s a born-and-raised Belgian from the French-speaking part of the country. At the same time, growing up she often felt like a foreigner in her homeland – especially at school, where her classmates were primarily white. “There was another adopted student from another race, and I think we were mirroring each other,” she tells me. “It turned out to be a bad relationship. He was harsh with me and treated me ill. Other children might not have outspokenly said I was different, but I could feel it from the way they interacted with me, especially when they saw my father who looked different from me.”

To fit in, she severed any remaining ties to China. She refused to learn Mandarin, visit her birth country, or learn more about her origins. She felt rejected by China, and that deep-seated hurt made her feel even angrier towards the country. It wasn’t until her final project for her MA in Visual Arts and Photography that Lefèvre revisited the trauma and exaltation of being a one-child policy baby with a fresh pair of eyes.

In 2017, Lefèvre summoned up the courage to fly to China for the first time with her adoptive father. Together with a tour guide, she relived the early memories she never had. They wandered around the city where she was abandoned, the province she was born in, and the villages where remnants of birth control policy propaganda still hung in the air. One of the first photos in The Land of Promise perfectly captures its consequences: “If you obey the policy, you will be respected. If you disobey, you will be shamed,” says Lefèvre.

The rest of the images provide glimpses into Lefèvre’s past. In one, a local crowd huddled around the six Belgian couples who held their Chinese babies in their arms. In others, walls of abandoned homes were painted with propaganda slogans: “to strengthen our population and to raise awareness of the current state of our country, we have to uphold birth control as a basic policy of the state.” There are portraits of families who gave up their second-born for a peaceful life, the police station where Lefèvre was turned over, and the orphanage that briefly became her home.

During her trip, Lefèvre discovered that families with second children faced extreme penalties. Boys were favoured over girls, and women were often forced into having an abortion. Residents risked losing their jobs, properties, and livelihoods. Second-born children were not registered and stripped of their basic rights, legally forgotten in the eyes of the policy. “I knew about the fines, but I didn’t know that if you couldn’t pay your house could be expropriated, or anything important to you could be removed or broken. You could also be beaten,” she says. “Reading about the discrimination against girls was very harsh, too.”

Lefèvre never once looked for her biological parents. “I didn’t want to,” she says. “I was more interested in the question of memories. The project was about going to the places that were related to my adoption and taking photographs of them. It’s a way for me to reconnect with my story, country, and family; a way to appropriate myself with these places and narratives through photography.”

The Land of Promises by photographer Youqine Lefèvre