INVESTIGATIVE journalist Deng Fei uses his weibo microblog for crusading, muckraking and humanitarian work.

Deng, aged 33, is probably one of China's best-known journalists, bloggers and micro-bloggers, most famous for reuniting a kidnapped child with his family in February and galvanizing people nationwide to aid in finding kidnapped children forced into begging.

In fact, he has become an Internet celebrity. Weibo is his weapon and he has nearly 300,000 followers (http://weibo.com/1642326133).

His latest projects are providing free lunches for poor children in rural areas - an Internet donation store Free Lunch for Children was launched last week in Hangzhou - and providing medical insurance for needy children with serious ailments. Locating abducted children is an ongoing campaign.

"The Internet changes everything and via weibo, one person can become an army," said Deng, a reporter for the Hong Kong magazine Phoenix Weekly. Wildly popular weibo is considered China's equivalent of international Twitter.

"Weibo connects journalists and thousands of people in a close way, hence, it is more powerful in providing and spreading truths than other sorts of media," Deng told Shanghai Daily last week in an interview in Hangzhou where Free Lunch for Children was kicked off.

"On weibo everybody is a journalist and everybody is a source."

After successfully using weibo in the nationally celebrated abduction case in February, Deng again used weibo in March to call for donations to buy lunch for poor children. A lunch costs around 3 yuan (46 US cents). So far he has raised nearly 13 million yuan, he said.

Last month, again on weibo, he called for donations to ensure every needy rural child has free medical insurance to cover serious illness. Some insurance companies and media are getting involved in the program.

"If the information was released on traditional media, things wouldn't be moving so smoothly," said Deng, a native of Yuanjiang City in Hunan Province whose home is in Beijing.

At the beginning, when Deng registered a weibo account two years ago, he didn't realize its power and influence; he thought it was simply a platform where one could only publish 140 characters (but 140 Chinese characters say a lot).

His attitude took a U-turn last July when Deng tweeted the news that an elderly woman in Hubei Province, the wife of a local government leader, had been beaten up by local police at the gate of the provincial government office because she was mistaken for an annoying petitioner appealing to the authorities for help. Many local governments don't like citizens with unsolved grievances going above their heads and taking their complaints to a higher level of government for redress of perceived injustice. Petitioners may be barred and harassed various levels.

In 24 hours that post about the beaten granny had been forwarded more than 1,000 times; it was his first weibo achievement. Then many journalists read the post, joined in and more unsavory doings were exposed. It was reported then that the woman's husband had been ordered by his superior to keep his wife quiet about the beating. It was also reported that the police who hurt the woman had been delegated powers to "deal with" petitioners who take their complaints to the provincial government.

Official sacked

Eventually, 11 days after Deng's initial post, a senior official of Wuchang District, Wuhan City in Hubei, was dismissed from his post and the head of the district's public security bureau was reprimanded.

Deng attributes the successful outcome of his expose to the mobilization through weibo of thousands of people, including journalists, all of whom put pressure on the government, which was unable to hide and cover up its misdeeds.

Deng continues to use traditional media to amplify the weibo effect and expand on issues "so that the complete, entire story is told." He both writes articles online and gives interviews about his work and his campaigns.

"Deng is a ground-breaking figure in the country's charity history, who created a weibo mode to arouse the demand of the masses for justice," said Elaine Liew, Deng's partner and the general manager of online store of Free Lunch for Children.

"It's a simple method," said Deng. "First, a weibo user with a certain number of followers can tweet on weibo about something that is important and moving, and the message should be objective. Second, the user can organize a team to get involved in an activity." This can be organizing free lunches for poor children, digging into the case of the woman who was beaten, or getting people out with their mobile phone cameras to take pictures of child beggars and upload them.

Deng plans to continue working on social welfare and justice issues. He emphasizes that with its multiplier effect, weibo makes one person an army.

And to enlist a real army, he plans to establish a charitable organization by the end of the year; everything is being prepared, but the name has not been chosen, he said.

These days, Deng hasn't written many articles as a journalist because he's busy with his charitable projects.

"Weibo has changed my idea of myself," he said. "The biggest change is that I, who thought I would be a journalist forever, am now determined to be a volunteer for the rest of my life."

But being a public volunteer and voice for good isn't easy "because nearly 300,000 people are watching me every day," Deng said. Still, he said he isn't stressed. "After all, the situation (of scrutiny of Deng) is at its most intense now, so it's bound to improve."

And while he doesn't feel personal pressure, there's a sense of urgency to his work. "Time is pressing," he said. "Children suffering illness cannot wait." That's why while he was busy with the Free Lunch for Children plan, he decided he had to move fast and on a dual track to organize medical insurance for poor children who are seriously ailing.

His busy schedule has kept him away from home in Beijing for months. But his daughter watches him on television. She told him that she points to him and tells her friends, "this is my father and he's helping other children.

Deng said he's proud to see that his daughter's sense of humanity and justice and he is proud to nurture her idealism. "When I was a boy I was very kindhearted," he said. "When I was age four, I even scratched my grandfather's face because I knew he was going to butcher a pig."

In 1996, he decided to study journalism in college, specializing in investigative reporting and exposing the seamy side of life and official wrongdoing.

His first big expose was a train-ticket rip-off by railway officials in 2002. At that time residents of Changde City in Hunan Province complained they couldn't get tickets to Shanghai, Beijing and other big cities during the Chinese Lunar New Year Festival.

Prostitution ring

Deng went to the local train station but no one would answer his questions. He waited until and official left his office to get some water.

Deng slipped in, rummaged through the wastepaper basket and found a paper titled "Allocation Table of Tickets," which specified how many tickets from Changde to big cities were allocated to leaders of the train station. The assumption was that they were sold in the high-demand period for personal gain. After he wrote his report, three officials of the train station were dismissed.

In 2007 Deng exposed a sex scandal in Henan Province involving leaders of the Zhongyuan Oil Field in Henan Province, the second-largest oil field of the Sinopec Group. At first there was an Internet posting (not Deng's) that many officials of the oil field were regularly having sex with willing local female high school students.

Reporters swarmed to Henan but no one get the real story except Deng. The oil field, the local government and the school all stonewalled reporters.

Deng waited and when the other journalists had left, he did the simple thing, calling each oil field figure named in the initial post as having sex with girl students. One man agreed to meet Deng and during their talk, Deng glimpsed some materials and saw a girl's name. With the help of a local policeman, he got the address of the girl, met the mother and got the contact for one key figure named Luo, a pimp. Eventually he got other men. Everyone was named.

Wielding his pen, Deng is always ready to help the weak, but he always does so using his own name, never a pseudonym favored by many people on the Internet. All his personal information, his photo and contacts, are very accessible on the Internet.

Threats and injury are not uncommon when investigative journalists close in on sensitive subjects. Deng said he has never been menaced in more than 10 years as a journalist.

"I believe that those bad people have a guilty conscience, and as long as my reports are objective and genuine, they can't do anything to me," he said.

Let's hope he's right.