Even working as a client of a Chinese company I see the same thing - they only want to communicate via random WeChat groups, and anytime you ask for things to be emailed its a battle to make that happen. Eventually the one specific thing you asked for will be emailed, then everything will revert to WeChat where its all buried away.

> like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail

I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. For example, if there has been an act of sabotage, having access to those ephemeral messages may be crucial to catch perpetrators.

I have no doubt that the government is able to get logs of WeChat messages going back who knows how long, but I was speaking in the context of the workplace. When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. This problem is exacerbated when there are dozens of informal WeChat groups that may or may not include certain people depending on the internal politics of the organization. It's a culture of ass-covering and secrecy that feels uncomfortable to me, although perhaps that's just part of living and working in an authoritarian country.

>>When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened.

It's not ideal, but I thought that WeChat had a desktop client (similar to WhatsApp) that allows for slightly easier scrollback, search and export/copy-paste functionality within the group chats. It doesn't help across the wider WeChat platform as the article points out, but in a corporate setting with many adhoc working groups it might help one to maintain context.

It's been a few years since I have used WeChat, and I suspect they might have improved their workplace features since then. The desktop app was a thing several years ago, but even then it depended on the right people being added to the right groups. I remember dozens of instances where people would say "oh, well we talked about that the other day" and then scroll back on their device to try find some conversation whose outcome was never logged anywhere else. If you were lucky they had saved a screenshot, without context, of course.

This was even more difficult when dealing with clients or third party vendors, because they would have their own WeChat groups where they discussed support issues or purchases. I remember a situation where we had to contact a former employee to find a password to a machine because it had been shared on a chat that only they were on at the time - that sort of thing.

To be fair, I do think that a lot of similar stuff happens on Slack, where private groups get created and decisions are made without always including the correct participants according to the org chart. And probably prior to the explosion of workplace chat apps people were doing this by getting together in person for lunch or drinks or golf. It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.

> It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.

Indeed. It takes good leadership to recognize the problem in the first place and to keep up on combatting it (e.g. actually checking if people keep their notes on a centrally managed system).

> I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view.

WeChat, like Whatsapp, stores canonical messages on device and not on the server as opposed to services like Messenger that store messages on the server. It has the same limitations as Whatsapp of only one primary device being able to connect to the service at a time and any new device starting from a blank chat history unless a manual transfer is done.

Some minimal amount of history is stored for government compliance (I believe it's around 30 days but this could have changed) and the government has the ability to flag certain accounts for longer retention but you can be fairly certain that Tencent does not have long term archives of all of your chats, because if they did, they would almost certainly offer chat history across phones.

The disappearance of chats across phones is a major usability pain point of Wechat and something they absolutely would fix if they had the ability but it's a deep technical decision baked in from the early days of the product and the refactor would be non trivial. It also conveniently gets the Chinese government off their back by pointing to a technical reason they can't cooperate to avoid having to deal with the headache of being more deeply enmeshed.

> I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view.

State security concerns aside, deleting messages is less expensive than keeping them. If your plan is to delete everything after N days, it's easy to partition data by day, and then drop the older partitons as needed.