Oh yeah, I am under no illusion about WeChat’s privacy. It’s insanely integrated into everyday life in China though - it almost feels as if people don’t care whether they use iOS or Android there, because they use WeChat apps for everything (banking, utilities, taxi, games, payments for everything, etc) rather than native apps.

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. WeChat is owned by Tencent which is heavily regulated by the Chinese Government since every company needs a Internet license to operate. It's a lot easier for the Chinese government to force Tencent to hand over the information willingly compared to the US getting the information in other ways.

Why would they need to recover them from a device at all? Do they not just get chat logs bcc'd to them as a matter of course?