Inside China, Bytedance's founder is known as pro-US. They've publicly made pro-US statements.
Furthermore, the CCP has 90+ million members. With the number of employees that Bytedance has in China, you'd expect — by proportion — that they have thousands of employees that are CCP members. But it's just a couple of hundred.
Bytedance's founder has made an effort to make this a global company, not a Chinese company, not a "CCP/state company". He believes in internationalism.
And yet here we are: Mike Pompeo calling him a "mouthpiece of the CCP", and many people on Hacker News believing that Tiktok is a big conspiracy to hack the United States. All without a fair investigation into who Bytedance is, how much of these fears are actually founded, or whether there are more productive solutions than kicking out all things Chinese.
The irony. Can you imagine what all this does to his pro-US stance, or what it does to all the pro-US people in China for that matter? Treating China as an enemy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> ByteDance has had a party committee since 2017 and is headed by CCP secretary and company editor-in-chief Zhang Fuping (張輔評), reported Human Rights Watch. Members of the committee hold regular gatherings at which they study speeches by Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) and "pledge to follow the party in technological innovation."
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
Furthermore, the CCP has 90+ million members. With the number of employees that Bytedance has in China, you'd expect — by proportion — that they have thousands of employees that are CCP members. But it's just a couple of hundred.
Bytedance's founder has made an effort to make this a global company, not a Chinese company, not a "CCP/state company". He believes in internationalism.
And yet here we are: Mike Pompeo calling him a "mouthpiece of the CCP", and many people on Hacker News believing that Tiktok is a big conspiracy to hack the United States. All without a fair investigation into who Bytedance is, how much of these fears are actually founded, or whether there are more productive solutions than kicking out all things Chinese.
The irony. Can you imagine what all this does to his pro-US stance, or what it does to all the pro-US people in China for that matter? Treating China as an enemy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.