The line’s origins were a mystery, but the online masses latched onto it as a joking commentary on their Web-addicted generation — lost in cyberspace, unreachable by the outside world. That very day, millions retweeted the phrase. Wen, though, gave it a new twist. He urged his tens of thousands of microblog followers to send postcards to the Mawei police station and post photos of them online, all with the same words: “Guo Baofeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner!”

Nobody can know if the Internet campaign made a difference. But instead of being lost in the prison system — four other bloggers arrested for reposting the same video were sentenced to one to two years in prison — Guo was released after 16 days. For Wen, the incident crystallized his thinking. “Humor can amplify the power of the social media,” he told me. “If it hits a nerve, like a case of injustice or abuse, it can be contagious. It’s indirect — just a joke, right? — so people lose their fear of getting involved.”

Growing up as the oldest child in a poor family in rural Guangdong Province, Wen wasn’t always keen to get involved himself. When army tanks crushed the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing, Wen, who was then a middle-school student prone to skipping class, applauded the crackdown. “I agreed with the government that it was necessary to prevent chaos,” he recalls. Wen’s most daring act in college — he was assigned to study machine welding at a technical institute in Harbin, a city in China’s icy far north — was to smuggle in Cantonese pornography and pop music to help him endure the long winters.

His Internet “awakening,” as he calls it, came years later, when he toiled at a power station near Guangzhou. One night after clocking out, Wen watched a television special beamed in from nearby Hong Kong that contradicted the official story of the 1989 massacre. Finding a trove of information online to confirm its veracity — this was before the Great Firewall, erected in 2003, blocked such terms as “June 4” — he emerged with a new conviction: “The Internet will open the door of democracy.”

Hungry to learn more, Wen transformed himself over the next decade into an information machine, first as a journalist and then as a blogger. Covering events for state-run newspapers and, later, for government television, he produced reports and commentaries that toed the official line. On the Internet, though, he adopted a more freewheeling persona, writing a popular blog called Ramblings of a Drunkard under a pseudonym. Soon, Wen moved full time online, working for the Chinese Internet company Netease and moonlighting as one of the country’s earliest citizen journalists. His first article, typed into his cellphone, chronicled the 2007 street protests in Xiamen that succeeded in halting construction of a chemical plant.

The censors were never far behind, turning Wen’s life into a perpetual game of hide-and-seek. First a few posts were blocked, then his entire blog, then the Chinese Internet portal he used. An overseas Web server worked until the Great Firewall shut it out too. Riding the next wave of technology, Wen began typing out 140-character blasts on Twitter and China’s fast-growing microblogging sites. Weibo, a Twitter equivalent that barely existed two years ago, now has 200 million users, churning out some 40 million messages a day. The government, hard-pressed to keep up, leans on Web companies to censor their own content in return for “self-discipline” points needed to renew licenses. “No place is safe anymore,” Wen says. “But whenever censorship grows, so do the opportunities for sarcasm and satire.”

Not long ago, Wen even dared to target China’s most unassailable icon: Mao Zedong. The chairman has been dead for 35 years, but his massive portrait still presides over Tiananmen Square. It is just one sign of what Wen calls the “awful influence” wielded by the founder of the People’s Republic. Ridiculing Mao is almost unthinkable in China today. Even so, on the anniversary of Mao’s death in 2009, Wen urged his online followers to join a devious “de-Maoification” campaign. Since “mao” is also the Chinese word for “hair,” he suggested posting before-and-after shots of shaved body parts — people literally “getting rid of mao.”