A kidnapped boy called Yang Weixin found begging on a street. Chinese authorities recorded 5,900 trafficked children last year. Photograph: Sina.com
It began with a letter from a desperate mother. It has become a campaign embraced by tens of thousands of internet users which appears to have resulted in at least one happy ending.
A Chinese activist's attempt to track down a missing child via microblogs has highlighted the problem of trafficking in the country and helped attempts to reunite thousands of lost children with their parents.
Yu Jianrong urged internet users to take pictures of street children and upload them on to Sina the Chinese equivalent of Twitter after a mother asked for help in finding her son.
The resulting movement has demonstrated the power of social media on the mainland, even in spite of the extensive censorship of services such as Sina.
China has 80 million microblog users in addition to a relatively small number who bypass censorship to access Twitter, which is blocked by the authorities.
Yu's campaign gathered pace over the Chinese new year, traditionally a time for family reunions, and within days has garnered more than 100,000 followers who uploaded more than 1,800 images.
Chinese authorities recorded 5,900 trafficked children last year. Previous reports suggest most are boys under five, often sold to rural families who want a son but in other cases forced to work as beggars.
Parents have previously used the internet to post images of their missing children on sites such as Baby Come Home, hoping that someone might spot them. But it took the initiative by Yu, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to create a wave of interest both online and in China's mainstream media.
Amid the publicity, a student browsing pictures of missing children spotted one he was sure he recognised: Peng Gaofeng's six-year-old son, Wenle, snatched from a street in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, three years ago.
Peng and his wife had plastered their business with posters of Wenle and offered a 100,000 yuan reward a huge sum for Chinese workers to anyone who could help find him.
Having had his hopes dashed repeatedly, Peng was stunned to receive an emailed photograph of a little boy in Jiangsu province and realise it was indeed his son. Police helped him to track down Wenle, who told an officer: "That man who is crying is my dad."
Peng told China Daily: "It's a miracle, a miracle that could not be true without the help of netizens. I've opened 13 blogs on the internet and pasted my son's photo everywhere online. Now, the efforts have paid off."
He said he believed Wenle was abducted by the late husband of the woman with whom he had been living as an adopted son.
Parents have often complained of police inefficiency and indifference when their children have gone missing. But the authorities have stepped up efforts in the last two years and Chen Shiqu, head of the country's anti-trafficking unit, used his own microblog to urge people to support Yu's campaign.
Last September, Xinhua reported that Chinese police had freed 10,621 women and 5,896 children since a crackdown began in April 2009.
The public security ministry said it had also improved measures to reunite families, building a DNA database that has so far matched 813 children and their parents.
In many cases, children are snatched as infants or toddlers, meaning they are too young to remember their parents and may be less recognisable.
One mother faced disappointment this week after wrongly identifying a child beggar as her missing son. He had been photographed with a man in Zhuhai, but DNA tests showed the two were father and son, said police.
Parents lucky enough to find their children still have to deal with the long-term consequences. Wenle appears to have grown attached to his kidnappers and be reluctant to leave.
His father said his son was healthy and doing well at school, but added: "My only concern is that he will not want to come home. This change will probably be more traumatic for him at this age than his kidnapping when he was three."
