Raises some interesting points about differences in business cultures. One thing that would get lost in the Chinese approach is having access to records of conversations -- I use email search every day to check the status of projects in various stages of development.
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Logging IM isn't that difficult. If you use something like Pidgin then you get all of your logs neatly organized in one place regardless of protocol.
Equally most corporate IM servers support logging. I expect that with a very small amount of hacking eJabberd could be persuaded to store good data even if it can't already do so.
I was actually making a reference to the cellphone conversations mentioned in the article.
There's some study out there on email vs IRC for team coordination. IRC won by a significant margin, if I recall correctly. The teams that used email less did better.