Mother and Child. ©Youqine Lefèvre

The Land of Promises

Youqine Lefèvre

2023 — China

About this series

The Land of Promises tells the intimate and personal stories of those living by the regulations of China’s one-child policy. Between the years 1979 and 2015, China took an excessive approach towards a critical population growth. The consequences of these controversial regulations were enormous, in particular for hundreds of thousands Chinese girls who were separated from their biological families and registered for adoption. Photographer Youqine Lefèvre is one of those girls. 
In 1994, six Belgian families, including Youqine Lefèvres’s adoptive father, travelled across China to adopt girls. Youqine Lefèvres was born in Hunan Province in 1993 and adopted at the age of eight months. According to official documents she stayed with her biological family for a month before they left her in a city called Yueyang. A resident found her and dropped her off at the police station. The authorities handed her to the orphanage and reportedly searched for her parents for four months. She lived in the orphanage for seven months before she was adopted. 
Youqine Lefèvre has no recollection of what preceded her adoption or of the meeting between the parents and children at the orphanage. Her ‘memory’ of the event has been mediated through the stories of her father and the other parents, along with the photographs and videos they made and official documents. 
This work is about the discovery of Youqine Lefèvrese’s origin country and an attempt to understand what led to the abandonment and international and transracial adoptions of countless young Chinese girls. The changes in their lives resonate upon this day and will continue to do so.

This image was taken in 2017 in Hunan Province, in the countryside around Yueyang. It shows an old propaganda message written by the Chinese government in order to promote the birth control policy. It is written: "If you obey the birth control regulations, you will be respected. If you disobey, there will be shame on you. » ©Youqine Lefèvre
Archival photograph taken by an adoptive parent; the group of Belgian parents was about to leave the orphanage. We see the adoptive parents, the adopted girls, members of the staff of the orphanage and some neighbours curious about the event. ©Youqine Lefèvre
A tub photographed near Shaxi, in Yunnan Province. Since the implementation of the birth control policy and still today, it is forbidden in China to know the sex of your child before birth. In some remote villages, just after birth, unwanted girls were drowned in a tub prepared in advance. If the child was a boy, his family thanked the gods. ©Youqine Lefèvre
Qian. ©Youqine Lefèvre
Yueyang Social Welfare Center. The orphanage where I would have lived for seven months. It is written "House of Hope", a synonym for ‘orphanage’ in China. ©Youqine Lefèvre
Xu Rui and Geng Xiaotong. ©Youqine Lefèvre
Kitchen. ©Youqine Lefèvre
Grandparent and grandson. © Youqine Lefèvre
Fishermen around Zhangjiajie. © Youqine Lefèvre

Photographer: Youqine Lefèvre
Nationality: Belgian
Based in: Namur, Belgium
Website: www.youqinelefevre.com
Instagram: @youqinelfvr

Youqine Lefèvre (b.1993, China) is a Belgian visual artist currently living and working in Namur, Belgium. Her artistic practice, combining photography, archives and video, is situated between documentary and intimate. Her first book, The Land of Promises, focuses on the Chinese birth control policy and the artist’s international and transracial adoption. It brings together themes that have always been present in her work: family, childhood and memory. Starting from a personal story, the subject broadens to become societal, social, political, cultural and economic. The book was shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture First PhotoBook Award 2022.