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Chinese Government Admits Collection of Deleted WeChat Messages (techcrunch.com)
The South China Morning Post reported over the weekend that Chinese authorities have the capability of retrieving deleted messages from the WeChat app. The newspaper noted that an anti-corruption commission in Hefei province posted Saturday to social media that it has "retrieved a series of deleted WeChat conversations from a subject" as part of an investigation. TechCrunch reports: The post was deleted Sunday, but not before many had seen it and understood the ramifications. Tencent, which operates the WeChat service used by nearly a billion people (including myself), explained in a statement that "WeChat does not store any chat histories -- they are only stored on users' phones and computers." The technical details of this storage were not disclosed, but it seems clear from the commission's post that they are accessible in some way to interested authorities, as many have suspected for years. The app does, of course, comply with other government requirements, such as censoring certain topics.
The Chinese government doesn't need to lie. They WANT their citizens to know they are being watched. Chinese censorship works mostly through deterrence.
Thet don't need to. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution killed as many people as the entire second world war.