Between 1979 and 2015, China’s one-child policy reshaped families on a scale that is hard to grasp from statistics alone. Youqine Lefèvre’s The Land of Promises approaches that history through the narrower, more exacting frame of adoption. Lefèvre, herself a Belgian photographer born in China, follows six Belgian families who travelled there in 1994 to adopt girls, and sets their accounts against the wider machinery of population control and the hundreds of thousands of Chinese girls separated from their biological families.
The book is not a single-voice memoir or a conventional documentary survey. It gathers what Lefèvre photographed on repeated trips to China, archival material from 1994, testimony from the people she met, and research drawn from demographers and specialists in Chinese birth-control policy—an essay by Joohee Bourgain extends the frame. The result is deliberately composite: personal narrative held alongside historical record, so that intimate experience and policy are read as parts of one another rather than as separate registers. Rob van Hoesel’s design serves that structure. The large-format Otastar softcover—23 by 29 centimetres, 240 pages, with a pasted-in booklet and bilingual English and French text—lets photographs, documents and written testimony occupy the same space without forcing them into hierarchy.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies less in spectacle than in method. Lefèvre is at once a participant and a returning observer; the work is both a discovery of her origin country and an attempt to understand the conditions that produced abandonment and transracial, international adoption. The layered construction, the juxtaposition of archival and contemporary material, and the deliberate pacing across 240 pages make it a considered object—one that reflects on how a coercive policy was experienced at the level of individual lives, and on what remains unresolved.
