China’s Lost and Found Daughters
A generation of children given away under China’s controversial one-child policy search for their biological parents.
Li Yongguo, a civil servant in eastern China, is on a mission to reunite families forced apart by China’s one-child policy.
He holds events for parents and children separated after the mass population control scheme began in the late 1970s, collecting DNA samples to match them.
Cai Fengxia is desperate to meet the parents who gave her away to a foster home in 1979. After searching for 12 years, she turns to Li Yongguo in a final attempt to find them.
Another woman, Li Junfen, has already been matched with her birth family but she’s reluctant to meet them. With news that her biological father is extremely sick, Li Yongguo tries to persuade her to seize the opportunity before it’s too late.
![Men and women gather at an event organised to help families reunite with the children they abandoned decades ago in Jiangyin City, eastern China [Screengrab/Al Jazeera]](/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/90f393eaa7114389aa0e2da5a2c01e78_18.jpeg)